


Let the Good Times Roll

by gutsforgarters



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Canon-Typical Violence, Codependency, Emetophobia, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Older Man/Younger Woman, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2020-01-01 04:13:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 12
Words: 63,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18328400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gutsforgarters/pseuds/gutsforgarters
Summary: Beth lies about her age and loses her virginity in the back of a truck to spite her ex-boyfriend. Usually she'd have to face the consequences of her actions, but then the world kind of ends, and now it's just her and the Dixon brothers against a horde of the walking dead. But Daryl's smart and resourceful if not a little crazy, and he's going to help Beth reunite with her family so long as Merle doesn't get the three of them killed first.Beth's not feeling very optimistic.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [Laissez les bons temps rouler](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LzktZYGBJw).
> 
> The working title for this fic was _The Dukes of Hazard_ (spelling intentional), which should tell you a lot about it and also me. The game plan is to take it through the early days of the outbreak and then finish it out at the start of Season 1, but who can say for sure? I certainly can't! 
> 
> This fic does not contain sexual assault or coercion, although sexual violence will be discussed. It also contains instances of verbal sexual harassment. And PLEASE, for the love of God and also Jesus, **read the Archive Warnings**.
> 
> [The in-progress soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1lSGynC6655U78JwSAcqdt?si=jzADUD8hQyGbzUgFLlzgjQ), now all in one place.

**(day 0)**

 

“I’m telling you, Beth, _I_ wouldn’t take him back if he begged me on his hands and knees in front of God and everybody.”

Beth’s sitting sideways in their family truck’s passenger seat with her sunburnt legs dangling out of the cab, wishing she were just about anyplace but here. “Never said I was takin’ him back,” she mumbles, knocking her bootheels together as if she could no-place-like-home herself right out of this conversation.  

“Yeah, but you never said you _weren’t_.” Beth ducks her head, stray strands of hair tickling her cheeks, and Maggie makes a frustrated noise. “Beth, are you even listenin’ to me or what?”

Beth wants to say _or what_ just to be a pain in the ass, but then Maggie would accuse her of acting like a baby, and then they’d get into a fight, and then Beth would have to stew in tense silence the rest of the way home from the Tractor Supply. She doesn’t need to create brand new problems for herself on top of the old ones, so she grudgingly wipes the petulant look off her face and lifts her head to meet Maggie's eyes. 

“I’m listenin’,” Beth says, as earnestly as she can. “And he’s not gonna want me back, so you don’t gotta worry yourself over _that_.”

Maggie selects unleaded fuel without looking at the gas pump, attention fixed firmly on Beth. “That's easy enough for you to say when he hasn’t done anything yet.”

Beth stops swinging her feet and braces her bootheels on the truck’s running board, face curving into a scowl. Maggie’s really testing her resolve to be mature about all this.

“What,” she says, “d’you want me to shut my phone off just in case?”

Maggie plugs the fuel nozzle into the gas tank. “Might not be a bad idea.”  

“Maybe I should take it one step further,” Beth says, unable to entirely rein in her snippy tone. “Maybe I oughta convert to Catholicism an’ join up at a nunnery _just in case_.”

Maggie is unamused. “Beth, when I was your age—”

Beth groans and tips back her head, looking imploringly at the bright blue sky as though to call down some timely divine intervention. “You sound like the ladies at the old folks’ home.”

“ _When I was your age_ ,” Maggie repeats, relentless, “all it ever took for some guy to get back on my good side was one regretful phone call and maybe some improvised poetry—”

If Beth banged her head hard enough on the dashboard, would it knock her out? “So I’ll unplug the landline.”  

Maggie sighs. Folds her arms and taps her index finger against her bicep. “I’m gonna get somethin’ to drink. You want anythin’?”

Beth blinks at her, surprised that she would let it drop that easily. Usually Maggie’s like a dog with a bone once she’s got herself fixed on something.

Of course, Maggie’s not necessarily _dropping_ it. Just putting it on pause to be resumed later. Still, a reprieve’s a reprieve.

“Cola and a Moon Pie,” Beth mumbles, then tacks on, “Please and thank you.” She’ll crash hard once the initial sugar rush has run its course, but she’d rather drown her sorrows in sweets than waste one more tear on the boy who dumped her without warning.

 _We want different things, Beth_. The hell does that even _mean_? Where’d Jimmy steal his little breakup speech from, anyways? _One Tree Hill_?

“Sure.” Maggie loops her purse’s strap over her shoulder. “Keep an eye on the pump while I’m gone, would you?”

“Uh-huh,” says Beth, and Maggie gives her a little wave before striding off towards the dinky seventies-era convenience store that neighbors the short bank of gas pumps.

The station’s empty but for their Ford Ranger with its bed full of horse and chicken feed, and it’s almost eerily quiet, calling to mind the opening scene of a horror movie—the part that builds the tension before everything goes to shit. Beth sways along to the song playing softly on the truck's radio, only to tense up when it gets cut off by an emergency broadcast. She relaxes when she hears the word _Atlanta_ , and only half listens to the newscaster’s rapid-fire report on what experts are calling a new strain of swine flu.

Somebody came through here and plastered a Confederate flag bumper sticker to the fuel pump. Beth scowls at it and starts picking at the corner, trying to peel it off so she can throw it in the trash.

The corner tears off, but the rest of the sticker stays stubbornly put. Beth grumbles and picks the film of adhesive off her thumb and forefinger, only vaguely registering the sound of a rumbling engine as it gets closer and closer to where Maggie parked the Ford. She doesn’t think much of it until another, much dustier Ford pickup truck pulls up to the other side of the pump, windows rolled down, radio blasting Motörhead so loud that Beth can feel the bass in the backs of her teeth.

The fuel pump blocks Beth’s view of the cab, but she can see the back end of the truck just fine. There’s a four-point buck lashed to the truck bed, dead black eyes turned towards Beth. Her stomach gives an uneasy spin.

The truck’s rumbling engine cuts out, taking the Motörhead with it. The driver’s side door creaks.

Trying not to be too conspicuous about it, Beth pulls one foot after the other into the cab, fingers curling around the door handle. She can lock herself in if she has to. Shit, but what about Maggie? And what if the guys in that truck go into the convenience store? Should Beth text her a warning? What if Maggie doesn’t feel her phone vibrating where it’s buried deep in her purse?

For a fleeting second, though, Beth feels kind of bad. Her daddy’s always telling her not to make snap judgments about people, to not judge books by their covers—of course, her daddy _also_ told her about certain men and the way they tend to treat women. And if her dad’s warnings weren’t enough, the first time Beth got catcalled by a strange man—at the ripe old age of fourteen, no less—certainly drove the point home.

But then she stops feeling conflicted when she hears a sharp wolf whistle that makes her hair stand on end.

“We- _ell_ , would you look at _this_. All by your lonesome, lil’ lady? Need some company?”

Beth’s fingers tighten around the door handle, knuckles coming up white. There’s a man leaning against the gas pump, and he’s openly leering at Beth’s thighs where they're left exposed by her cutoffs. Beth would peg him for late forties or early fifties, and his hair’s shaved close to his skull, teeth bared in a loose approximation of a smile. He’s wearing a sweat-stained undershirt, faded jeans, and clunky work boots, and when he lifts one hand to scratch at the crown of his skull, Beth notices that his fingernails are packed with slivers of dirt. Another man, dressed much the same as the first, makes his way to the gas pump, head ducked low, not paying Beth or his buddy any attention.

Beth’s smile is stiff, and she curses herself as soon as she feels it on her face. This guy’s sure to take that as an invitation, even if it’s more of a strained rictus grin than anything else.

“I’m fine,” Beth says, voice warbling despite her best efforts to keep it cool. “I’m just waitin’ for my sister to get back.”

 _Shit_ , Beth thinks when the guy’s grin just gets bigger. She shouldn’t've said anything at all, for starters, and if she absolutely _had_ to open her mouth, she should’ve told this guy that she was waiting for her violently overprotective older brother who was on parole after being charged for assault with a deadly weapon.  

Speaking of deadly weapons, these guys have _got_ to have at least one shotgun stashed away somewhere in their truck, unless they killed that buck with their bare hands. Great.

“A _sister_ , huh?” The guy crosses one ankle over the other, bootheels tapping the pavement, and leans in close enough that Beth could potentially swing the passenger door wider and bash his nose in with it. Something to think about. “Older or younger? Either way, I’ll bet she ain’t as pretty as _you_ , darlin’.”  

Beth takes her eyes off the first guy long enough to assess his buddy. He’s still ignoring them, which is both good and bad. Good, because he’s probably not interested in ganging up on her with the other guy. Bad, because he probably won’t be inclined to help her out in the event his friend gets handsy. Or violent.

Beth tucks her fingers into her pocket and feels around for her cell phone. “She’ll be real pissed when she sees you harrassin’ me, I’ll tell you that much.”

The guy smacks his hand against his sternum as if to stem a gushing wound, like Beth just pumped him full of buckshot. “Ain’t harrassin’ nobody. I’s jus’ bein’ friendly, s’all. Gots to mind my manners in front of a _lady_. Name’s Merle, lil’ lady. What’s yours?”

Beth doesn’t say anything. She wiggles her phone out of her pocket, flips it open, and types _SOS_ into the message field before sending it to Maggie.

“Hey!” Merle’s voice gets harsh all of a sudden, and Beth’s head jerks on her neck like someone’s pulling it on a string. “You look at me when I’m talkin’ to you, missy. I gots to mind my manners, an’ you gots to mind _yours_.”

Beth strains to see through the convenience store’s grimy window. Someone’s moving in there, but who?

“I’ve got pepper spray in my purse,” she tells Merle. Of course, her purse is in the footwell, and she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to grab it before Merle can grab _her_. Guess she’ll have to take her chances.

Far from looking wary, though, Merle looks _intrigued_. He rocks back on his heels and gives Beth a onceover that's more calculating than lustful.

“That right?” he drawls. “What else you got?”

It’s a muggy day, but Beth’s skin still breaks out in goosebumps. Is she reading Merle right? Is he saying what she thinks he’s saying? Is she gonna get robbed in broad fucking daylight?

“Man, give it a fuckin’ rest already.”

Beth startles, eyes swinging to Merle’s buddy as he sidles out from behind the gas pump to grab a fistful of Merle’s shirt. His hair’s pretty short but still a good deal longer than Merle’s, and he looks about ten years younger. He’s the kind of guy that Beth would usually cross the street to avoid, but he’s not looking at her like she’s meat. Hell, he’s barely looking at her _at all_ —his eyes are on his buddy, and they’re narrowed in a scowl.

Merle shakes his friend off roughly, slapping his restraining hand away.

“The fuck are you, boy? Her white fuckin’ knight?” Merle lets out a bray of laughter at his own suggestion, and the second guy makes a disgusted noise before spitting on the asphalt. That’s charming.  

“Man, jus’ fuckin’ look at her. She’s fuckin’ jailbait, dumbass. You tryna get us arrested or somethin’?”

Beth doesn’t imagine that it would be their first time seeing the inside of a holding cell. 

“Mind your damn business an’ jus’ pump the fuckin’ gas—”

“Hey!”

The guys’ heads whip around in unison, reminding Beth irresistibly of hounds on point. As for Beth, her heart gives a hard, relieved thump at the sound of Maggie’s voice, at the sight of her storming out of the convenience store like an avenging angel. She gets right within Merle’s reach, shoving herself between him and Beth and turning herself into a human shield. Beth snags her sleeve and holds on tight.

“You best clear off.” Maggie’s already got her phone out and unfolded. “My family’s close personal friends with the sheriff, and I got her on speed dial.”

Beth’s pretty sure that Maggie doesn’t even know the local sheriff’s full name, let alone her personal number. Still, Merle and his friend look convinced, a testament to Maggie’s ability to bullshit with the best of them.

But then Merle switches out his wary scowl for a syrupy smile. “Now, sweetheart,” he says, and Maggie squeezes her phone so hard the plastic shell creaks, “there ain’t no need t'be gettin’ the law involved—”

“You’re right about that much.” Maggie’s jaw is strung tight, and there’s a muscle jumping in it like a pulse. “There's no need to involve the cops, supposin’ you and your friend clear on outta here by the time I’ve finished countin’ to ten.”

Maggie kinda sounds like she’s channeling Clint Eastwood, but Beth refrains from commenting. Whatever works.

Merle’s eyes get all thin and squinty, and Beth doesn’t think it’s because the sun’s in his face. He raises his index finger and points it at Maggie's sternum like the barrel of a gun.

“This here’s public property, sugar tits. Me an’ my brother didn’t lay no hands on your lil’ sis there. We was jus’ bein’ friendly with her, an’ there ain’t no laws against _that_.”

Beth’s pretty sure that her sister stopped listening after _sugar tits_ , because Merle’s barely finished talking when Maggie hauls off and slaps him.

“What the _fuck_!” Merle roars, hand flying up to cradle his bruised cheek. He jerks forward like a dog on the end of a chain, but then his brother wraps both arms around his middle and hauls him out of reach. “What the fuck—Daryl! You best let me go, boy!”

“Think it’s best I don’t,” Daryl mumbles. As for Beth, she grabs hold of Maggie, too—just in case.

“What the hell are you _doin’_ ,” she hisses in Maggie’s ear, even though part of her just wants to laugh hysterically. _How is this her life_?

Maggie ignores her. “That ain’t nothin’ compared to what I’ll do t’you if you touch my sister, you inbred fuckin’ rednecks,” she snaps, pointing a finger in Merle’s face. He bares his teeth, and Beth grabs Maggie around the wrist and forcibly lowers her hand before he can do something crazy like bite that finger off.

“Don’t force women, sugar tits,” Merle says, and Maggie’s body jerks against Beth’s. Please, please, God, just make them both _shut the hell up_. “Jus’ might hafta put one’a my smokes out on her pretty face, though, teach you two bitches a lesson in respect.”

“We respect folks who earn it,” Beth pipes up, eyes meeting Daryl’s over their siblings’ shoulders. He watches her from under his choppy bangs, wary as a cornered wolf. Beth’s scalp prickles, and she looks quickly away, back to his brother.

“You heard my sister,” she goes on. “Clear off ’fore we call the cops—supposin’ that cashier in there doesn’t call ’em first.”  

Merle and Daryl both crane looks over their shoulders, Merle’s nose knocking into Daryl’s cheek. The cashier’s looking out at them through the front window, white faced and clutching at his phone.

Merle turns his head and spits a great bubbling glob of phlegm and saliva onto the ground by Maggie’s feet. He brings his arms up and breaks Daryl’s hold, hissing like an angry snake.

Beth tightens her grip on Maggie and leans back in her seat, but Merle doesn’t rush them. He just yanks his truck’s door open and clambers inside. The engine revs to life, and Motörhead comes blasting on again.

“Fuckin’ hell—the tank ain’t full yet, jackass!” Daryl rushes to yank the fuel nozzle out of the gas tank, not even bothering to hang it back up before jumping into the cab. Merle peels away from the gas pump before Daryl can even get his door all the way shut, tires spitting gravel at Maggie and Beth. Beth turns to watch them go and is greeted by the sight of Merle flipping her and Maggie off through the rolled-down window.

And then they’re gone.

Beth looses a shaky breath and drops her head against Maggie’s shoulder. Her underarms are damp with nervous sweat.

“Y’okay?” she mumbles.

Maggie twists around to frame Beth’s face in her hands. “I should be askin’ _you_ that question. Those assholes didn’t touch you, did they?”

Beth wraps her fingers around Maggie’s wrists and shakes her head. “Nah, they didn’t. I’m fine.”

Maggie thunks her forehead gently against Beth’s before going to hang up the fuel nozzle Daryl left to coil across the asphalt. Then she hangs up the nozzle she was using and screws the gas cap shut.

“Sorry,” Maggie says. “Dropped your stuff at the register when I got your text. You want me to go back in an’ get it?”

Beth pulls her door shut and speaks to Maggie through the open window. “Nah. Lost my appetite.”

Maggie hops into the driver’s seat and buckles herself in. “This is a _nice_ town,” she complains as she backs away from the pump. “Don’t need trash like that rollin’ through it.”

“They probably won’t stay for long,” Beth says. “They looked like drifters to me. Probably just here to hunt.”  

Maggie makes a grouchy noise, then changes the subject. “You still sleepin’ over at Georgia’s tonight, or would you rather stay in? We can take over the den and marathon that show you like. The one with the cute monster hunters?”

It’s nice of Maggie to offer, but Beth shakes her head. “No, thanks. Georgia’ll be real upset if I cancel on her.” Anyway, Georgia’s working through some boy troubles of her own, and Beth wants to commiserate.

Maggie joins the flow of the sparse traffic. Beth can’t see Merle’s truck anywhere. “Offer’s still open if you change your mind.”

Beth won’t, but she nods like she’s considering it. The emergency broadcast from earlier is long over, but Beth wouldn’t be able to hear it through the sudden burst of static even if it wasn’t. She fiddles with the dial until she finds an oldies station with a relatively clear signal, singing along to the crooning voice on the radio.

 _Hey, everybody, let's have some fun_  
_You only live but once_  
_And when you're dead you're done_

 _So let the good times roll_  
_Let the good times roll_  
_I don't care if you're young or old_  
_Get together, let the good times roll_


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beth doesn’t smoke. Doesn’t play drinking games with her friends. Doesn’t spread her legs when she sits. She doesn’t have sex before marriage and she definitely doesn’t get into cars with strange men. Hell, she never even let Jimmy get under her bra, and who knows, maybe _that’s_ why he broke up with her.
> 
> It's all so fucking _stifling_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I know the end is coming soon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUQiUFZ5RDw).

Beth takes one step inside the roadhouse and nearly turns around and walks back out. And she probably would have, too, if Georgia didn’t have the foresight to grab hold of her arm. Georgia’s acrylic nails bite crescent moons into Beth’s bare bicep, but the pinch doesn’t do anything to dispel the scene before her, so Beth guesses that this isn’t, in fact, a nightmare.

Beth scowls and shakes Georgia off, but she’s afraid of what Georgia’ll do if she tries to leave again—draw blood, possibly—so she stays reluctantly put. For now.

“The hell kinda place is this?” Beth demands. “I thought we were goin’ to a restaurant.”

The look Georgia slants Beth is all practiced innocence. “This _is_  a restaurant.”

“Has it even passed a health inspection in the last decade?” Beth wants to know, clutching her purse to her stomach in case anyone’s inclined to snatch it.

In response to Beth’s mostly rhetorical question, Georgia just shrugs.  

Beth thought they were going someplace  _classy_ , is the thing, or at least someplace that didn’t have  _semen stains_  on its bathroom walls. And, yeah, she went on alert when Georgia drove them to the roadhouse on the south end of town, but honestly, the exterior looked pretty innocuous, and she was willing to give it a shot. But the interior…

There are  _stuffed_   _deer heads_  mounted on the walls. 

Some guy at a table to their left turns his head and spits a black glob of chewing tobacco onto the floor, and now _Beth_  clutches at _Georgia’s_  arm, but to cling rather than restrain.  

“I’m not doin’ this,” Beth informs Georgia. Goddammit, she dressed up for this. She swapped her cutoffs and t-shirt for a gauzy skirt and a baby doll blouse, and her cowgirl boots for her nice white ballet flats. This is the kind of outfit she wears to  _church_ , for cripes’ sake.

Had she known where she’d wind up, she would’ve put on a Hazmat suit.

“Sure, you are,” Georgia says absently, avidly taking in the roadhouse’s interior like it’s a goldmine and not a freaking  _cesspool_. “‘Cause I’m your ride home, and I ain’t doin’ this by myself.” Georgia’s look turns sly. “Unless you wanna call up your parents and tell ’em where you  _actually_  went.” 

Beth’s grip on Georgia’s arm goes bruise tight. “That’s blackmail.”

Georgia doesn’t even flinch, which says a lot about how committed she is to this whole thing. Beth’s thin, but she’s strong from years of farm work, and Georgia bruises like, well, a peach. “It doesn’t have to be,” says Georgia, “if you’d just loosen up a little.”

Beth thinks that Georgia is loose enough for the both of them. Which is mean and uncharitable, but Beth’s  _feeling_  mean and uncharitable. “There’s a  _motel next door_.”

“ _Pfft_.” Georgia literally waves that off. “So what? Ain’t like either of us are gonna use it. I’m here to flirt with college guys and piss Gordon off, not lose my purity ring.”

The lighting in here’s too poor to say for certain, but Beth would bet that the roadhouse’s clientele runs less towards frat boys and more towards bikers and rednecks. “We’re gonna get carded.”

Georgia links arms with Beth and tugs her inexorably forward. “That’s why I brought a fake ID.”

Beth’s jaw drops. “Jesus, you’re gonna get us arrested!”

“Not if you keep your mouth shut I won’t.”

Beth scowls, but she lowers her voice. “Where’d you get a fake ID, anyways?”

“David knows a guy who knows a guy who’s been in an’ outta jail a couple’a times.” 

David is Georgia’s older brother, and Beth had no idea that he was involved with the sort of people who produce fake IDs for minors. “I’ll bet that bartender’s seen it all,” Beth says, getting desperate now. “That fake ID of yours won’t fool anybody.”

Georgia smiles like a cat who ate the canary. “Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m gonna convince some lonely guy to buy me a drink. You oughta do the same.”

Beth wants to  _scream_. This wasn’t the plan. The plan was to sneak out after curfew and eat their sorrows away at a nice restaurant. The  _plan_  was to slurp up overpriced spaghetti funded by Georgia’s dad’s pilfered American Express card. If Beth gets out of this unscathed, she swears to all that's holy,  _she will never speak to Georgia again_.

Then Beth hears a sharp wolf whistle that sets her teeth on edge, and did she think she had a chance of getting out of this unscathed? She was wrong.

Hell.  _Hell_. What are  _even_  are the odds? Is this a cosmic  _joke_? Because Beth’s not laughing.

“Well, if it ain’t Sugar Tits Junior! Big sis finally cut them apron strings loose or what?”

With all the fatalistic inevitability of a horror movie protagonist, Beth turns slowly around to face her own personal mouth-frothing monster. The guys from the gas station are sitting across from each other at one of the stamp-sized tables, glasses of draught beer clutched in their hands, and the older one—Merle—has his eyes trained squarely on Beth.

The younger one— _Daryl_ , Beth thinks—is too busy chewing on his thumbnail to pay Beth or Georgia any attention, but he’s not the one Beth’s worried about.   

Georgia leans her face against Beth’s and says, “You know these guys, Beth?” She sounds wary, but she also sounds _intrigued_ , like she thinks Beth must be leading some kind of secret double life.  

Lord Almighty, Beth’s never gonna hear the end of this. “No,” she says firmly. “No, I don’t. C’mon, Georgia, let’s just go—”

“Aw, don’t be like that, sweetheart,” Merle complains, and he must have real sharp ears, to have heard Beth and Georgia’s mumbled exchange over the Creedence Clearwater Revival blasting out of the jukebox. “I jus’ wanted to apologize for earlier. You caught me in a shit mood, sugar. Swear I’m usually a real nice guy.”

Merle’s smile doesn’t  _look_  nice. It looks like an open bear trap, is what it looks like, but before Beth can excavate her pepper spray from her purse and blind him for real this time, Georgia uncoils her arm from Beth’s and steps up to the table—much to Merle’s visible delight. 

 _Oh my God_ , thinks Beth.  _She’s lost her damn mind_.

“Hiya,” Georgia says, planting her open palms on the tabletop and leaning forward to be heard clearly over the music. “Are you friends of Beth’s? I’m Georgia.”

Beth’s gonna kill her. She’s gonna kill her, and then she’s gonna kill Gordon for inducing her to this, and then she’s gonna dump their bodies in the same grave and light that grave on fire and piss on the ashes.

Merle lets out an admiring whistle. “That’s a real pretty name you got there, Miss Georgia. Don’t suppose your middle name’s Peach, huh?”

“Nah.” Georgia digs her toe into the floor and twists her foot back and forth. “Just plain ol’ Anne. What’re your names?”

Georgia looks at Daryl when she asks for their names, but he just slumps lower in his chair and stares at the filthy floor like it’s worthy of extensive study. Merle reaches across the table and slaps his arm, making him flinch.

“Mind your damn manners, boy.” Merle leans back in his seat, sticking out a thumb like he’s hitchhiking and pointing it at his own chest. “Name's Merle, sweetheart, an’ this here’s my baby brother Daryl. He’s a real ornery sumbitch, but he’s sweet as sugar underneath it all. Ain’t that right, boy?”

Daryl mumbles something under his breath, and Beth can’t make out what he’s saying, but she suspects it’s rude. Yeah. She can relate.  

“Y’all wanna sit for a whiles?” Merle’s eyes flick from Georgia to Beth and back again like he can’t decide which of them to leer at. “Let us buy you ladies a couple’a drinks.”

“That’s mighty kind of you.” Georgia’s voice goes all slow and syrupy and recklessly flirtatious, and Beth really could kill her. She could also walk out of here and abandon Georgia out of spite, but she won’t. She won’t leave Georgia alone with these guys, and she certainly won’t take the chance that Merle won’t buy Georgia draught beer instead of the bottled stuff with sealed caps.

So Beth presses her lips into a tight, bloodless line and all but storms up to the table. She doesn’t want to sit next to either of them, but Daryl’s the lesser of two evils, so she plunks down onto the seat next to his, not even pretending to be subtle about scooching her chair farther away. He scoffs under his breath, but when Beth turns to glare at him, he’s focused on his mostly empty glass of beer, face blank.  

Georgia claims the only other free seat, and Merle wastes no time draping his arm across the back of her chair.

“What’s your poison, ladies?”

Beth’s gonna lose all feeling in her lips if she pinches them any tighter. “I don’t drink.”

Merle frowns, and Georgia rushes to say, “Well, _I_ do. I’ll have whatever you boys are havin’.”

 _Boys._  Beth snorts, and she can see movement in her periphery like Daryl’s lifting his head to look at her again, but when she glances at him sidelong, he’s gone back to staring into his glass.

“Girl after my own heart,” Merle says to Georgia, but then his eyes track back to Beth. “Sure you don’t want anythin’, lil’ missy?”

Only a ride out of here. “No, thank you.”

Merle lets it go for now, rocking out of his seat and slapping Daryl’s shoulder in passing on his way to the bar. “Proud Mary” fades into “Bad Moon Rising” as he saunters off, giving Beth the feeling that someone with a lot of quarters must be a big fan of CCR.

Georgia folds her arms on the sticky tabletop and gives Daryl a slow onceover. Beth guesses that, between him and Merle, Daryl looks a little less likely to be teeming with the clap, and also like he might even bathe every other month. Slim pickings and all.

“You an’ your brother from around here or what?” Georgia asks, and Daryl’s shoulders jerk up and down like he’s flicking off a fly. “I ain’t never seen y’all in town before.”

Oh, come on. Their town’s fairly small, but it’s not  _that_  small. No way has Georgia got everyone’s faces memorized.

“Jus’ passin’ through,” Daryl mumbles, drumming his bitten-down fingernails against the tabletop. Beth almost pities him. Almost.  

“That’s too bad.” Beth can’t even tell if Georgia means that or not. “Can’t really blame y’all for not wantin’ to stick around, though. This place’s boring as shit, ain’t it, Beth?”

“I like it okay,” Beth says, and maybe a little too sharply, because Daryl gives her another fleeting look, and Georgia’s doe-brown eyes go all wide. “It’s a nice place to live.”

Honestly, Beth’s privately inclined to agree with Georgia’s assessment of their hometown, at least to a point. There isn’t much to do, and the boys are kind of dumb and calf eyed and pretty much all look the same, and the adults are all stiflingly conservative, but if nothing much interesting happens around here, then neither does anything  _bad_. It’s peaceful around here. Safe. Safe enough that some folks still leave their doors unlocked at night.

Georgia recovers from her surprised daze and tells Daryl, “Beth’s gotta think that way, on account of she’s pretty much stuck here for life. Someone’s gotta take over her daddy’s farm, an’ I don’t think her brother or sister are real inclined to do it. Gonna marry some local boy an’ pop out a couple’a babies, aren’t you, Bethy?

Beth clenches her fists so hard her knuckles pop, but she’s saved the ugly necessity of storming out of here and pleading with her disappointed parents for a ride home by Merle’s return. He’s whistling along to the music and juggling four glasses of draught beer.

Well. At least  _someone’s_  in a good mood.  

Merle drops into his chair and distributes the drinks, and Beth frowns when he slides one across the table to her. Did she not make it clear that she doesn’t drink?

“Know you said you don’t drink, lil’ missy.” Merle gives Beth a syrupy smile like he thinks he’s being nice or something. “But I got you one anyways, jus’ in case you changed your mind.”

Beth automatically wraps her fingers around the cool glass, but she doesn’t take a drink. “Thanks, but I’m good. You can have it.” She nudges the glass in Merle’s direction, but he just looks affronted.  

“Now, honey, I spent my hard-earned cash on that there beer—”

Daryl scoffs when Merle says _hard earned_ , but Merle ignores him.

“—an’ it’d be a real damn shame if it went to waste.”

“Yeah, but it won’t be a waste if  _you_  drink it.” Beth’s trying to be polite about this, if only because she doesn’t want a repeat of the Gas Station Incident, but the words get slurred between her clenched teeth, and she can feel a scowl growing on her face.  

Merle’s jaw tightens. “Girl—”

“Fuck’s sake,” Daryl barks, and Beth and Georgia both jump like startled deer. Daryl grabs Beth’s rejected glass and pulls it over to his end of the table. “Jus’ gimme the damn thing. Goddamn pain in the ass.”

Beth can’t tell if Daryl’s calling her or Merle or both of them a pain in the ass, but she’s too grateful to him for deflecting Merle to get mad about it regardless. Even if Daryl only did it to shut them all up, he still intervened, same as he intervened at the gas station.  

Daryl gives her a funny look, and Beth’s scalp tingles like it did when their eyes met over their siblings’ shoulders. Crap. She’s staring at him, isn’t she? She looks away in a hurry, face burning like she got too close to an open fire.

“ _Shiiit_ , there he goes again.” Merle nudges his shoulder against Georgia’s, grinning at Beth and Daryl over the damp rim of his glass. “This here’s the second time in a row Daryl’s jumped to the lil’ miss’s rescue. Ain’t he a regular Prince fuckin’ Charming?”  

“Huh.” Georgia’s practically vibrating with the force of her curiosity, which doesn’t bode well for Beth. “Really? That’s sweet.”

Daryl makes a disgusted noise, but he doesn’t spit, so at least there’s that. He takes a long draw of beer, and Beth watches the muscles work in his sun-browned throat for a minute only to realize that she’s staring. With far more effort than she’d admit to exerting, she forces her eyes back to the tabletop. Her hands are shaking, so she shoves them in her purse and unearths her cell phone, flipping it open and pretending to read text messages that aren’t there.

Jimmy hasn’t called or messaged her. Maggie would be thrilled.

“Shit!” Georgia barks, and Beth almost drops her phone. Georgia’s elbow knocks into her glass, and Beth scrambles to right it before it can spill a tide of beer over everyone’s laps. Georgia’s got her phone out, too, and she’s scowling at the screen like it just insulted her mother.

Beth can guess, but she still asks, “That Gordon?”

Georgia’s knuckles are white. “Yeah.”

“So don’t answer.”

But Georgia’s temper must have consumed what little common sense she has, because she makes her umpteenth questionable decision of the night and says, “Nah. I’mma give the lil’ rat bastard a piece of my mind.” Beth tries to protest, but it’s too late: Georgia’s already accepted the call. “The fuck you want, jackass? That side piece’a yours give you the clap?”

Merle snickers, and Beth drops her face into her hand with a groan. She can hear Gordon’s voice buzzing through the phone’s speaker, but she can’t make out what he’s saying. Whatever it is, Beth’s sure it’s wheedling.

“Hold on,” Georgia says, and Beth looks at her through her fanned fingers. She’s got her phone pressed to her shoulder. “I’ll be right back, okay? Just gimme one second.”  

“But,” Beth starts, and that’s as far as she gets, because Georgia’s already jumped out of her seat and disappeared into the thronging crowd.

God. Fucking.  _Dammit_.

“The fuck’s Gordon?” Merle wants to know.

Beth massages her temples. “Georgia’s good-for-nothin’ cheatin’ ex-boyfriend.”

“Damn,” says Merle. “She lookin’ for a rebound?”

“Go ask her,” Beth snaps.

Merle must think that’s a mighty fine idea, because he drains his drink in one long swallow and pushes out of his seat. “Think I just might.” He tosses a leering grin at Beth and Daryl over his shoulder. “Y’all keep it PG-13 while I’m gone, now.”

Beth’s fingers spasm against her face. Daryl just flips his brother off and goes back to nursing his second beer.  

Beth should leave. She should get up and find Georgia before she does something stupid like taking Gordon back, or something even stupider like having sex with a fortysomething creep and contracting an STD.

She doesn’t. She decides to wait for the crowd to thin a little, and when it does, she’ll stick out her elbows and go wading through it. For now, she focuses on remaining calm, arms crossed, leg bouncing. She’s just gotta. Give it a couple of minutes.

A couple of minutes turn into eleven as Beth endures CCR’s extended cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and those eleven minutes turn into fifteen, and then twenty. Unlike Merle, Daryl doesn’t go anywhere, but he doesn’t talk to Beth, either. Barely touches his third drink, even. Beth can feel him looking at her, though. It isn’t a constant feeling, like he’s doing it in furtive glances, but he’s definitely looking.

Beth peeks at him through the lock of loose hair that trails down her cheek. He’s got his left forearm braced on the table, muscles tensed, hard veins pressing up close to the surface of his skin. He’s wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, and his exposed bicep is…well, it’s definitely something. The kind of something that makes a bubble of heat swell down low in Beth’s tummy.

Beth tears her eyes away from that godforsaken bicep and glares at her lap, cheeks heating up for the second time tonight. No.  _No_ , okay? She’s not gonna do this.  

She’s not gonna talk to him, either, but then she does, because she’s an idiot. “D’you think they left together?”

Daryl doesn’t answer right away, and Beth’s about to repeat herself in case he didn’t hear her over “Run Through the Jungle,” but then he says, grudgingly, “Dunno. What’s it matter to you, anyways?”

Beth wants to slap him. “Just wonderin’ if I should call the police or not.”

Daryl sets his glass down a little too hard. “Merle ain’t no rapist. He’ll only fuck that mouthy lil’ friend’a yours if she wants him to.”

“She doesn’t know what she wants,” Beth snaps, and Daryl actually looks mildly startled. “She ain’t in her right mind. She’s outta her head over her stupid boyfriend, and she’ll do just about anythin’ to spite him.”

But _Beth’s_ not ready to go that far out of spite, even if Daryl  _does_  have really nice arms.

Well, yeah. Obviously. That goes without saying, doesn’t it?

_Doesn’t it?_

Daryl looks pointedly at the phone cupped in Beth’s hand. “You’re so worried, why don’t you just fuckin’ text her?”

Oh. Right. Duh. Beth flips her phone open, but it buzzes before she can compose a message. Beth scans the text, then scans it again, because she can’t be reading it right.

She _is_  reading it right.

Beth sits back in her chair and stares sightlessly into the middle distance. “I’m gonna kill her.”

“What?” says Daryl, and when Beth looks at him, he’s making a face like he already wishes he hadn’t asked.

Beth turns her phone around and shows him the message.

_Gordon came to get me. Srry!_

“She took him back,” Beth tells him, voice shaking with suppressed rage. “She took that goddamn good-for-nothin’ two-timer back, an’ now I don’t have a ride home!”

Okay. So maybe not so suppressed.

Daryl shifts in his seat. “Ain’t there somebody you can call? How ’bout that loudmouth sister’a yours?”

Beth guesses that she  _could_  call Maggie, but at what cost? She definitely can’t call her parents. She could call one of her friends, but none of them can keep a secret to save their lives, and then it would get back to her family, and then what?

Beth knows what. She’d get grounded until she’s thirty, that’s what.

Beth takes a deep breath. She’s got an idea. It’s a terrible idea, but last hope of a desperate man and all that.

“Can you give me a ride?”

“What?” Daryl blinks rapidly, then scowls. “Hell nah.”  

“C’mon, why not?” God, what is she doing? Why the hell isn’t she letting it go? “I got cash. I’ll pay you.”

Possibly she shouldn’t have told him that she’s got money in her purse.

Daryl doesn’t seem interested in robbing her, though. “I ain’t runnin’ a fuckin’ taxi service.”

Beth sandwiches her phone between her folded hands and tucks those hands against her sternum like she’s praying for succor. “C’mon. It’s what Jesus would do.”  

“Ain’t religious, neither.”

Beth’s lower lip trembles, and she’s only faking it a little, because she really is that desperate. Daryl’s face flickers with something like panic, and then he screws his eyes shut and breathes hard through his nose.

“You even trust me enough to get in a car alone with me?”

Beth’s not sure if she does, but he _did_  step in at the gas station when Merle was about to go off on her, and again when Merle was pressuring her into having a drink. Daryl’s not very friendly, but that just means that he isn’t  _too_  friendly.

“Guess I do,” she decides out loud, and Daryl scoffs. “C’mon, please?”

Daryl’s glare could peel paint, but he pushes back his chair and gets to his feet, digging in his back pocket and unearthing a set of keys.

Beth grins and hooks her purse over her shoulder, but then she hesitates. “Wait a second. How much have you had to drink? Are you even good to drive?” Dammit, she should’ve thought of that earlier.

“Now you ask me?” Daryl shoulders his way to the exit, and Beth trots at his heels, using his bulk as a shield against the encroaching crowd.

“Well, are you?”

“Takes more’n two an’ a half glasses’a beer to get me lit.”

Well, he’s not weaving on his feet or anything, and his eyes looked pretty clear, so Beth guesses he’s telling the truth. And if he’s lying, and they crash into a tree or something, it’ll be Beth’s own fault for not having the nerve to fess up to her parents.

The endless stream of CCR is finally broken by a pre-Michael McDonald Doobie Brothers’ song just as Beth and Daryl reach the exit. Daryl doesn’t hold the door for Beth, and she has to scramble to catch it before it can smack her in the face.  _Jimmy_  would have held the door.

Annnd she’s not gonna draw comparisons between this guy and her ex-boyfriend. No, siree.  

The door swings shut behind her, cutting off “Long Train Runnin’,” and Beth stands still for a second as she waits for her eyes to adjust to the overcast night. The parking lot’s empty of any other living souls and stiflingly quiet, and Beth feels compelled to say, “I still got that pepper spray in my purse, y’know. In case you were wonderin’.”

Beth can’t make out much of Daryl’s face, but she suspects he’s rolling his eyes at her.

The trek to Daryl’s car is short, but Beth still has enough time to stumble twice over loose chunks of gravel. Daryl, on the other hand, moves through the darkness like some kind of nocturnal predator, and Beth can’t believe that a guy twice her size is managing to be ten times more graceful. How is that fair?

It’s not until they’ve reached the old Ford pickup from earlier—at least the dead buck’s gone, thank God—that Beth thinks to ask, “How’s your brother gonna get home?” Not that she cares.

“Merle’s got his bike,” Daryl grunts. “’Sides, he’s prob’ly gonna be spendin’ the night at that roach motel over there.”

Beth doesn’t want to think about that too hard. “Oh.”

Daryl climbs into the truck, then leans across the front seat to unlock the passenger side door for Beth. She braces a foot on the running board and boosts herself inside, skirt bunching up around her thighs as she slides across the leather bench. Daryl’s too busy revving the engine and backing out of his parking space to pay her any mind, so she hurries to smooth out her skirt before she can flash him. Then she buckles herself in and hugs her purse to her stomach.

“Where you live, anyways?”

“Oh. Um. On the other side of town.” She gives him the directions, and he grunts to let her know he heard her before swinging out onto the highway, and then…that’s it. Utter silence but for the rumble of the rusty old engine and the cricket song filtering in through Daryl’s cracked window. Beth tries to roll hers down, too, but gives up when it sticks halfway. She leans her cheek against the glass instead, eyelids drooping.

It’s a long, silent drive to her family’s farm. Daryl doesn’t seem inclined to turn on the radio, and Beth’s not brave enough to risk fiddling with it herself. She hums a couple bars of a CCR song that’s gotten stuck in her head, only to cut it out in a hurry when Daryl makes an irritated noise.

It’s late—nearly midnight, according to the readout on her phone—and there aren’t a lot of lights along this stretch of highway, so there isn’t much to look at. Beth taps out a message to Georgia— _I got a ride home, not that you care—_ and then tucks her phone into her purse. And that’s it. She’s got nothing to look at and nothing to listen to but the rumble of the engine and the whistle of the truck’s slipstream as Daryl leans harder on the gas.

Well. Not  _nothing_  to look at. There’s Daryl, hands resting low on the wheel, the set of his jaw tense and pissed off. Beth doesn’t know who he’s madder at: her or Georgia or his brother.

His anger doesn’t really scare her, is the thing, even though it probably should. Beth likes to think she’s a good judge of character, and Daryl might be a jerk and a grouch, but he doesn’t give her serial killer vibes.

Of course, most folks thought that Ted Bundy was an upstanding citizen until he got arrested, so maybe Beth should defer her assessment of Daryl’s character until  _after_ she makes it home in one piece.  

He hasn’t looked at her the way Merle looked at her, though, like she’s a hunk of venison he wants to eat raw. He hasn’t looked at her like  _that_ , no, but Beth doesn’t think she imagined the way he kept glancing at her back at the roadhouse, almost as if he couldn’t help it, almost as if something about her drew his interest whether he wanted it to or not.

Like maybe he—

Beth’s mind spins in circles. She thinks about the way her scalp tingles whenever their eyes meet, about the giddy bubble of heat that’s been slowly expanding in her stomach for a good twenty minutes now. About Daryl’s hard arms and thick wrists and big hands. About everything she isn’t supposed to want. About the kind of men she’s not supposed to make eye contact with, let alone speak to.

Thinks about Jimmy and the way he made her cry until her eyes swelled up.

Beth scratches her nails against the upholstery and looks at Daryl’s big fingers. Thinks about those fingers being rough with her, but not rough enough to hurt. Just rough enough to make her feel it for a while afterwards.

The bubble of heat in her stomach spreads, then sinks. Sinks down deep between her legs and settles there to simmer like a stove on low heat.

God, she’s nuts. She’s gotta be nuts. Because Beth—

Beth doesn’t smoke. Doesn’t play drinking games with her friends. Doesn’t spread her legs when she sits. She doesn’t have sex before marriage and she definitely doesn’t get into cars with strange men. Hell, she never even let Jimmy get under her bra, and who knows, maybe _that’s_  why he broke up with her.

She’s pre-leather pants Sandy in  _Grease_  and it’s fucking  _stifling_.

“You don’t have to take me home.”

Wait. Who said that?

Beth’s eyes have adjusted well enough to the night by now that she can just make out the grouchy look Daryl tosses her way. “First you won’t leave me be till I agree t’give ya a damn ride, an’ now you’re changin’ your mind? You always this fuckin’ wishy washy?”

Oh. Guess  _she_  said that.   

Beth digs her nails into the seat. Scratches faint white lines into the old leather like an animal’s claw marks.

She could backpedal. She  _could_.

She doesn’t.

“No,” Beth says, mildly surprised that she’s able to speak around the uneven pulse hammering in her throat. Her own daring’s got her by the jugular, fit to choke her half to death. “I mean, you could take me back to _your_  place. If you. If you wanted.”

Daryl stomps on the breaks, and Beth’s seatbelt digs into her stomach hard enough to leave a bruise. Daryl’s looking at her like—

She doesn’t know how he’s looking at her. Possibly like he thinks she’s out of her mind.  

“You outta your fuckin’ mind?”

And there it is.

Beth could just about die. Could just rip her own skin off to escape the humiliated blush that’s set every square inch of it on fire.

“You might wanna move,” she mumbles, addressing the dashboard. “Can’t just sit here in the middle of the lane. You’ll cause an accident.”

No, he won’t, because his is the only vehicle on the road as far as Beth can see. Which is just too bad, because she really wouldn’t mind dying in a car crash at this present moment.

“What,” and now Daryl sounds  _really_  mad, and it makes the hairs on Beth’s arms stand on end, “you think this’s fuckin’ funny or somethin’? You an’ that lil’ friend’a yours like to troll bars an’ cocktease strange men? That what you do for fun?”

Beth sits up a little straighter. “I ain’t  _cockteasing_  you. It was an honest offer, but if you don’t wanna, just say so instead of snappin’ at me.”

Daryl squints at her. He’s clinging to the steering wheel like it’s the only thing stopping him from touching  _her_. He doesn’t say anything.

Oddly emboldened by his silence, Beth says, “I ain’t jailbait. I’m legal, so it’s not like you’d be breakin’ the law or anythin’.”

She’s not lying, technically, because—again,  _technically_ —he wouldn’t be breaking  _Georgia’s_  consent laws. So even if they got caught, he probably wouldn’t get arrested.

Probably.

Daryl faces front again and eases his foot back onto the gas, not even bothering to reject her properly, and Beth flushes hot and cold with mortification. Jesus, just let the earth open up and take her.

But Daryl’s not driving straight, and he’s not putting on much speed, either. What he’s doing is easing the truck over to the side of the road, into the shallow little grassy indent that eventually spreads into a copse of trees.

So maybe he’s gonna strangle her and toss her body in a ditch, after all.

Daryl puts the truck in park, then cuts the engine. He heaves his door open and hops out, and Beth twists to watch him circle to the back of the truck. Through the grimy windshield, she can see him lowering the tailgate. He’s looking in her direction, and she can’t see his eyes through the dark, but the weight of their attention is palpable enough to make her skin tingle. It’s almost like he’s already gotten his hands on her.   

At no point in her life did she fantasize about losing her virginity in the back of a truck, but you know what? Now she kind of wants to.

Beth tumbles out of the truck and shuts the door too softly to make it stick. The damp grass soaks through the thin soles of her ballet flats and sends chills up her legs, and she almost trips twice, but then she’s standing right in front of him, and she doesn’t know what to do.

And it’s a funny thought, but  _he_  doesn’t seem to know what to do, either—he’s just standing in one spot, hands squeezing the empty air. She can smell him, and it’s just that strong smell that most guys have, sweaty and a little musky, but Beth’s struck by an insane urge to plant her face in the crook of his neck and _lick_  him. Is that normal?  

She’ll contemplate that later. For now, she gropes around for the ledge of the truck bed and hops on up, skirt bunching around her thighs like it did when she first got in the cab. She curls her fingers in the hem of Daryl’s shirt and reels him in, and he lets her. His thighs bump the insides of hers, and she spreads her legs wider, skirt inching higher still.

She cups Daryl’s jaw, fingers trailing through his scruffy beard, but when she tries to tug his face down to hers, he pulls back against the pressure.

“You sure  _you’re_ in your right mind?” he asks, and Beth giggles nervously.  

“Didn’t touch a drop of that booze back there,” she promises, tucking her fingers around his belt, nails digging into the old, slick leather. “I’m stone cold sober.”

Daryl’s hips jerk a little when Beth touches his belt, but he mutters, “That ain’t what I meant.”

She’s _not_  in her right mind, is the thing. She’s hurting and pissed off and out to spite everyone she’s ever met.

But Daryl’s been almost kind to her, and that means something. And watching the play of muscle in his arms makes her stomach spin in a way she’s never felt this keenly, and that means something, too.

Beth’s thumb rides across Daryl’s lower lip, and his breath stutters out, gusting humid as the night air across her cheeks. Beth smiles sweetly. Shyly. 

“We don’t gotta,” she tells him, heart in her throat, “if you don’t wanna.” The rejection will sting like hell and probably make her want to crawl in a hole in die, but she’s not about to stoop to the subterranean level of every random creep who’s ever fucked her with his eyes. She’s not about to pressure this oddly decent man into anything he doesn’t want to do.

“Think I should be tellin’ you that,” he mumbles.

Beth tucks her thumb shallowly into his mouth, sliding it along the damp inner rim of his lip. She imagines how this wet mouth would feel on other parts of her, and the shallow pulse between her legs spikes. “What’s your last name?”

Daryl’s voice slurs around Beth’s thumb, but his irritated confusion comes across loud and clear when he says, “The fuck? What’s it matter?”

Beth lets go of his lip and skates her thumb across his chin. “It matters to me,” she says. Weirdly enough, it really does.

His eyes glitter at her in the dark. “Dixon.”

Her smile blooms into a grin. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Dixon. I’m Beth Greene.”

Daryl huffs, but he must not have lost patience with her, after all, because he pushes his hands up her thighs and fastens them around her hips. He yanks her closer, and she yelps when the cold corrugated floor of the truck bed bites into the soft backs of her thighs, but she still tilts her head and kisses him first.

He’s the one who pulled her closer in the first place, but he still takes a second to return the kiss, like some part of him can’t believe this is happening. She gets that, because it feels a little unreal to her, too. It feels unreal even as he angles his head, nose pressing flush to her cheek, and opens her lips with his.

Those lips are still a little damp from the beer he was drinking, and Beth thought she’d recoil from the taste—she never did like the smell of alcohol, never liked the sickly sweet burn of it in her nose—but it’s not as bad as she was expecting, and underneath the buzz of beer, his mouth tastes clean.

He tastes a little like tobacco, too, and that’s not as pleasant as the alcohol, but Beth still slides her tongue into his mouth, tasting that sour tang and taking it down her own throat. He makes a shocked noise like he wasn’t expecting her to be this bold.

She wasn’t expecting it, either, even if she usually took the lead with Jimmy—but Daryl isn’t Jimmy. Jimmy’s a boy with careful hands and a shy smile. This is a strange man who tastes like beer and tobacco, whose beard is scratching hot little lines across her cheeks. This is a man who’s digging his fingers into Beth’s hips like he’s trying to claw through her skin down to the muscle and bone.  

He leans on her heavily, hips wedged between her thighs, flat chest crushing her breasts back against her own ribs, and she clings to his shoulders to keep from tipping backwards beneath his weight. And since her hands are up there, anyways, she skates her fingers down his arms, groping at the curves of muscle.

He takes some liberties of his own, tucking his fingers under the billowing hem of her baby doll top and feeling up her stomach, the tickle of it making her skin twitch and her muscles jump. And she anticipated what comes next, but she still startles a little when he shoves up the cups of her bra to grope her breasts.

He squeezes her with his big rough hands, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough that she might be sore later. And then she thinks about how she’ll probably be sore in other places, too, and that thought yanks a grunt out of her throat like a fish on a hook.  

He must interpret that noise as one of encouragement—and, God, it is—because one hand lets go of her breast—just the one, because the other keeps on working her nipple into a stiff, aching nub—and travels south to tuck itself into the warm V of her spread legs, and, oh. Oh, Jesus.

He traces the seam of her sex through her sticky panties, then tugs the cotton aside to touch her for real, and Beth breaks their kiss to pant against his bicep and mouth at his tattoo. She doesn’t. She doesn’t know how to describe what she’s feeling. It’s definitely not like going to the gynecologist. It’s not even like touching herself.

Daryl hisses when he feels the wet dribbling out of Beth’s slit, and she thinks she knows why. Thinks he might be surprised by how slick she is already. She’s a little surprised, too, because she’s rarely gotten this wet before, and never this quickly. Usually it takes a good twenty minutes of rubbing herself raw to get her this worked up, but here she is, soaking through her panties, clit tingling with something not unlike an electric current.  

Right. Her clit. She’s called it that in her head—not the technical  _clitoris_ , but the shorter, dirtier word—and she’s even said it out loud a few times while talking with her friends, but she’s never heard a guy call it that to her face. Will Daryl talk to her about her clit, talk about how hard it is, hard like a dick, talk about how wet she’s getting for him, so wet that Beth can smell it on the humid night air? Beth wants him to, but she’s not sure if he will. He hasn’t said anything since he started touching her for real, has only grunted against her mouth and her cheek and made other little wanting noises while his hips fucked the air.

Beth wraps her hand around his wrist, and he stiffens, retracting his fingers like he thinks she wants him to stop, but she doesn’t. God, she doesn’t. She slides her hand across his, mapping out the tracery of thick veins, and pulls his fingers up to her clit.

He hesitates for long enough that Beth nearly starts begging him, but then his fingers move. He plays with her for a couple of seconds, working her labia apart until they’re spread wide as a gaping wound, drawing her clit up harder and harder and tighter and tighter till Beth thinks that her heartbeat just might escape through her cunt.

 _Cunt_. That’s another word she wants him to use. Wants him to use it while he’s got his dick in her, wants him to ask her if her cunt always gets this wet, or if it’s just for him.

But then he pulls his fingers off of her with an obscene squelching kind of noise and tucks them into his mouth—oh, _God_ —and when he does talk, it’s just to say, “Get in.”

Get in? In where?

Daryl presses his hand against her belly and pushes at her, and she realizes, _Oh_. Into the truck bed. Alright.

Beth lets go of him and braces her hands on the corrugated floor that bit into her thighs, scooting blindly backwards, shoes nearly sliding off her feet when she digs in with her heels and pushes back with her legs. Daryl climbs in after her, turning to one side to fiddle with something piled in with the rest of the anonymous junk in here, and then he’s unrolling a nylon sleeping bag.

Oh. That’s…considerate of him. She guesses.

He gets it laid out flat, and, not quite looking at her, he mumbles, “G’on.”

Beth bites back a smile. He’s had his fingers between her legs, and now he’s being shy. God help her, but that’s bizarrely cute.  

He probably wouldn’t appreciate hearing that, though, so she keeps her mouth shut and lies back on the sleeping bag, fingers working restlessly against the slick nylon, breath coming in uneven little gasps.    

Daryl kneel-walks into the space between her open legs, pushing up her skirt and tugging down her panties—doesn’t bother taking them all the way off, though; just leaves them wrapped around her left ankle. He tucks his hands under her knees and lowers his head, and Beth’s stomach does a drunken somersault like she got a contact high from the beer on his tongue. Is he going to—

He doesn’t. He makes a disgusting noise low in his throat and  _spits_  on her, and Beth jolts, not sure if she’s grossed out or turned on or both. His saliva’s cooler than the slick leaking out of her cunt, and she can feel it dribbling down her lips to slide into the crack of her ass. Daryl spreads his spit around, then eases two callused fingers into her, and they’re so thick that she can’t hardly believe they fit, but they do. And if those fit, then so will his dick.

He fucks her with his fingers like they  _are_  his dick, thumb circling her throbbing clit, and Beth clings to the sleeping bag and twists her hips, chasing the mounting pressure between her legs, desperate for it to break right open—

It doesn’t. Daryl pulls his fingers out of her cunt and slaps the back of her thigh. “Turn around.”  

He wants to— _what_?

Beth thinks about insisting that they do it face to face, but honestly, what difference will it make? She’s gonna lose her virginity either way, and she imagines it’ll feel the same no matter what position they do it in. So she flips onto her stomach and rises shakily onto her hands and knees, one shoe falling off and getting lost somewhere in the truck bed.

There was a dead deer in here earlier. Sure, she’s not touching anything it touched, thanks to the sleeping bag, but still. There was a dead thing in here.

Beth swallows, throat clicking. “D’you got a—”

Daryl’s belt jingles. His zipper grates. “Yeah,” he grunts, and Beth hears foil tearing, so, okay. At least they’ve got that covered.

Beth kneels there, bare ass hanging out, pulse beating almost painfully in her wrists, and Daryl’s jeans scrape like sandpaper on her skin when he scoots in close. His dick bumps her thigh, warm and hard and twitching a little, and then he’s grabbing a handful of one ass cheek, thumb digging into the muscle. 

His tangled pubic hair scratches her ass. His dick bumps her sticky pussy lips and brushes her slippery clit, then nocks against her spread cunt like an arrow against a bowstring. Beth clenches up all over at the contact—heart, stomach, cunt. He’s not even in her yet, and her body’s already clamping shut. No way is he gonna fit, no way—

The thumb on her ass sketches a figure eight like he’s trying to soothe her. “Girl, you gotta relax.”

“I  _am_  relaxed,” Beth snaps, too defensive, too _loud_ , and Daryl shushes her.  

“Can’t fit my dick in your pussy if you keep clenchin’ up,” he snaps back. The wide head of that dick pushes shallowly at her, in and out, making her cunt flutter. More slick gushes out of her to hear him talk like that, even if he sounds half embarrassed to be saying it at all.

That’s what she wanted to hear from him.

And her arousal makes her brave, so she tosses a look at him over her shoulder, ponytail sticking to the sweaty nape of her neck. She says, bold as you please, “Thought guys liked it tight.”

She can’t believe she’s talking like this, and he must not believe it either, because his mouth slackens, and a breathless noise punches out of him. But that’s nothing to the noise he makes when he grits his teeth, angles his dick, and shoves it into her cunt.

Beth stops looking at him, then—she can’t help it, because her head’s drooping on her neck like a flower grown too heavy for its stem. Her arms tremble, and she drops onto her elbows, ass pressing flush to his hips and slicking her wet, open pussy the rest of the way down his dick.  

He grabs hold of her hips with both hands. He’s trembling. She’s making this man shake like a leaf.

“Shit.  _Shit_.”  

Maggie’s always saying that virginity’s just a patriarchal social construct, and she’s probably right, but it doesn’t _feel_  like a social construct. It feels like too much, is what it feels like.

It’s a little weird, and it doesn’t hurt but it makes her abdomen ache a little like the weaker cousin of a menstrual cramp. What really gets to her, what really hits her like a punch to the groin, is the elastic stretch of her cunt clinging to his dick, to that thick length of flesh forcing sensitive tissue apart and holding her open for him.

No, it doesn’t hurt. Not really. Not enough to make her want to stop.

So Beth pulps the sleeping bag in her fists. And then she tucks her face into the crook of her elbow and slowly, so slowly, circles her hips.

Daryl swears, and his hips were rutting shallowly against hers this whole time, but now he pulls his dick almost all the way out of her before fucking it back in, and the shock of penetration compels Beth to bite her own arm to muffle her yelp, to draw her flesh into her mouth and suck a self-inflicted hickey.

She just keeps getting slicker on his dick as he fucks it in and out of her, gushing all over the place like she’s wet herself. It _does_  feel a little like having to go to the bathroom, this mounting need for release, but she knows from touching herself that that’s not what this is. And speaking of touching herself, she'd get her fingers on her clit if she could, but they're clenched so tight they've gone numb, and she can't seem to convince them to let go of the sleeping bag. All she can do is fruitlessly chase the feeling by twitching her hips back against Daryl’s.  

And she can tell from the way he’s moving now that he’s chasing that feeling, too. His sharp hipbones are digging into her ass, his heavy balls are slapping at her upturned pussy, and the wet sound of his dick pushing in and pulling out of her is louder than the words he shushed her for. Beth knows that they could get caught, knows that someone could drive right by and see him humping her ass, and she should care, and she  _does_ care, but thinking about it, about being caught, has hot tension spooling tight in her belly and slick waterfalling down her thighs, and,  _God_.

She realizes she’s saying that out loud, that she’s taking the Lord’s name in vain over and over into the sweaty crook of her elbow, and every time she says it, Daryl fucks into her harder, making her body rock back and forth with each stuttering thrust. And the harder he fucks her, the louder she gets, her _Oh, Gods_ turning totally incoherent, words blurring into grunts, _squeals_ , and she’s panting and whining and begging him after all, begging him without words, begging him with her spasming pussy and restless hips. It hurts to breathe, like her lungs are punctured, and her feet are twitching like she’s in her death throes, and she—

She feels it when he comes. He’s wearing a condom, but she can still feel the hard kick of his pulsing cock. He fucks her through his orgasm, grunting like maybe he’s dying a little bit too, resting more and more of his weight on her until his chest is plastered to her back, flannel shirt sticking to her skin where her blouse has ridden up.

Beth’s cunt pounds with her aborted orgasm, and she whines pitifully. God, she was so close—if he had just touched her clit—

He tucks his face into the crook of her neck. “Did you come?”

She can’t believe he’s asking her that question. She wants to say something sarcastic, but she just shakes her head, wheezing a little, and he nods. Pulls himself out of her and off of her. She can hear him peel off the condom with a tacky noise, and on the heels of that sound comes the metallic grate of his zipper pulling shut.  

“Turn over.”

Beth rolls onto her back, thighs flopping loosely apart, and Daryl stretches out next to her. He slides his fingers down her trembling belly and pushes them into her sore cunt, thumb circling her clit. Beth arches her hips, moaning at the ache, but the hurt just pushes her closer to orgasm. She grips Daryl’s forearm with both hands and fucks herself on his fingers, closer, closer, _please_ , just, _fuck_ —

Beth’s eyes are squeezed shut, but she hears Daryl curse, and bright white light blazes through her lids. They’re lying flat, out of sight of anyone passing by on the road, but Daryl still rolls half on top of her as the car flies by, and she can feel his heart thumping rabbit quick against her side.

His fingers pressed up harder against her clit when he scrambled to shield her from the passing car, and that works with the shot of fear to yank her orgasm out of her by the heels. She tucks her face against Daryl’s shoulder when she comes shaking, pussy throbbing, toes curling convulsively.

The car’s long gone by the time Daryl eases off of her, tugging his fingers loose from the tight clench of her body. Beth opens her eyes just as he lifts his fingers to his mouth, and she can see that the pads are pruned like he spent too much time in the bath.

“Y’alright?” he asks her, and she giggles a little deliriously, cunt still fluttering with aftershocks.  

“Uh-huh.” She’s grinning like an idiot, and whatever she’s feeling must be contagious, because Daryl’s mouth twitches into the closest thing to a smile she’s seen from him yet.

But then the almost-smile drops, and his head whips to one side—not looking towards the road, but towards the woods. Beth strains her ears, and it takes her a second, but she hears what he must have heard.  

Twigs snapping. Grass crunching wetly underfoot. Footsteps that she couldn’t initially hear over the rush of the passing car.

Beth’s heart squeezes, and when she turns wide eyes to Daryl, he whispers, “Stay down an’ don’t move.”

Beth tucks her knees against her chest, pulling her panties up around her hips and smoothing down her skirt, but otherwise stays still. “Who d’you think it is?” she asks Daryl, and he shushes her.  

Daryl rolls onto his belly and starts digging through an undefined lump that might be a duffel bag, and then he’s—yup, that’s a shotgun. Beth violently hopes that he only intends to use it in a worst-case scenario.

Please, please don’t let this be a worst-case scenario.

Daryl props the barrel of the gun on the edge of the truck bed and cocks the hammer. And he waits.

 _It’s probably just some drunk_ , Beth tells herself, except. Except, drunks can get violent. Drunks can be armed.

Whoever it is, they’re getting closer. Their footsteps are getting louder, and so is their breathing.

It sounds funny, though. The breathing. There’s a hissing quality to it, like something you’d expect to hear out of the mouth of a snake. And woven through that hissing is a tortured sort of moan, like they’re in pain.

Beth clenches her hands against her stomach, wanting to retrieve her stray shoe in case she needs to run but unwilling to make too much noise. Her breathing’s too loud, so she cups one hand over her mouth to hold it in.

If the person out there is injured, shouldn’t they help them rather than point a gun at them? It’s what her dad would do.

She’s about to say something to Daryl when the gun goes off, and the blast temporarily deafens her. She shoves herself upright, forgetting Daryl’s warning to stay down, and Daryl’s lips are moving, but she can’t hear him over the ringing in her ears.

She can’t hear much, but her eyes have adjusted to the dark, and she can see surprisingly well. And what she sees are two grasping hands and a dark, open mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Checks "monster stumbles upon canoodling couple" off my Horror Cliches Bingo card. 
> 
> (I want to take a second to thank everyone who gave this fic a shot. I'm not very good with words, but I really do adore and appreciate every last one of you.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is what her lizard brain was trying to tell her. That these are predators, and that predators eat people. It was trying to tell her that she’s not at the top of the food chain anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [They told me don't go walking slow, the devil's on the loose](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFx-eNrjtmQ).

**(day 1)**

 

Daryl’s gun goes off a second time, and the guy scrambling at the truck bed wheels back, pushed onto his ass by the force of the buckshot that  _just went through his freaking stomach_. There’s a second gaping wound in his shoulder, but honestly, that isn't Beth’s primary concern at the moment.

“Oh my God.” Beth can barely hear her own voice over the ringing in her ears. “ _You just killed a guy_.”

Daryl ignores her in favor of firing off another round, which is frankly overkill in the most literal sense of the word. Beth bats at his shoulders, too upset to think through the consequences of hitting a homicidal maniac, eyes burning hot with panicked tears.

“Leave him  _alone_ ,” she shrieks, fisting a hand in Daryl’s shirt and just about ripping a seam. “He’s already dead, you fuckin’ bastard, just—”

“Girl, I told you to stay the fuck  _down_.” Daryl shakes her off like he’s batting a fly, and Beth collapses onto her ass with a flare of pain that heralds a bruised tailbone.

Instead of doing the smart thing and running for her life, though, she sits forward on her knees and snarls, “Why should I? You killed him; why don’t you just kill me too?” She’s a witness, after all. If Daryl doesn’t kill her now, he’ll definitely do it later, and then he’ll dump her body in a ditch for  _real_.

Movement in her periphery catches Beth’s attention, and she snaps her head around to watch the guy Daryl just  _shot three times_ twitch on the grassy incline. A moan rattles in his throat, and he struggles to roll onto his side, hands slapping at the ground.

_Oh my God_ , thinks Beth.

He’s still alive.

She’s gotta call 911—but, shit, shit,  _shit_ , her phone’s still in her purse, and her purse is still in the cab. Can she get to it before Daryl grabs her, or should she just make a break for it and run until she finds someone who  _does_ have their phone on them?

No, she decides. First, she’s gotta climb down there and put pressure on that guy’s wounds, and _then_ she’s gotta check if he’ll live long enough for the ambulance to get here. She grips the edge of the truck bed and goes to heave herself over the side, but Daryl snatches her around the waist and drags her back in, plugging up her nose with the smell of sweat and sex. Beth shrieks at him, kicking out with her legs and beating his arms with her fists.  

“The fuck—shit, _watch it_ —the fuck you thinkin’, girl?”

What is  _she_  thinking?  _What is she thinking_? “Lemme _go_ , you crazy bas—”

The rest of what Beth was going to say gets bitten off between her clenched teeth.

Because the guy Daryl just tried to murder is climbing laboriously to his feet, stumbling a couple of times on the way up, and now he’s walking towards the truck. He’s not even trying to staunch his wounds with his hands the way you’d expect—no, his arms flop loosely at his sides, and his mouth hangs wide open, teeth clicking together every few seconds like he’s chewing on something.

Every fine hair on Beth’s body stands on end. Some sleeping thing that lives at the back of her brain shudders and wakes up.

This isn’t right. He shouldn’t be moving at all, let alone walking. There’s something  _off_  about the way he moves, too, and not because he took three rounds of buckshot to the torso. It’s in that clumsy shuffle, the way he holds his arms, the click of his gnashing teeth. The utter absence of human expression on his face.

Uncanny valley.

That’s what this is called.

“Dammit, girl.” Daryl squeezes Beth bruise tight. “Can’t you see that ain’t no person? Jus’ fuckin’  _look_  at ’im.”

_But that doesn’t make any sense_ , Beth thinks as the guy trips over his own feet. If he’s not a person, then what else could he possibly be? What other option is there?

“Drugs.” Beth digs her nails into Daryl’s wrist, not to fight him off, but to ground herself in this new, skewed reality. “He’s gotta be on drugs. PCP or somethin’—”

“I seen guys on PCP.” Daryl unravels his arm from around Beth’s waist and shuffles her to one side. “This ain’t that.”

Well, alright, then  _Beth_  must be on drugs. Sure, she didn’t touch the drink Merle bought her, but what other explanation is there? Is she having a psychotic break?

Possibly.

Daryl retrieves his shotgun. The guy’s close enough now that Beth can smell him, and he smells like roadkill. He smells like things left to rot and bloat in the sun. Her stomach pitches, and she presses both hands to her mouth.

She can see his eyes now, too, and she can just barely make out the color.

They’re yellow. Gold, almost, and there’s no light in them. They’re flat and filmed over.

This time, Daryl’s shot hits the guy right between those impossible eyes.

He goes down. He goes down, and he doesn’t get back up.

Beth screams, and the sound bounces off her stacked palms.

Something’s starting to crack inside of her. There’s this fissure in her chest, and she doesn’t want to know what will happen when it finally breaks open.

“Fuckin’  _hell_.” Daryl cracks his shotgun open and checks the cartridge. “The fuck  _was_  that thing?”

Yeah. Good question.

Beth drops her hands into her lap. Her face feels kind of numb, and her words come out a little slurred when she says, “Should we. Should we call the cops?”

Daryl gives her a look like he’s questioning her intelligence, which, fair. “An’ tell ’em  _what_ , exactly? That that motherfucker over there got up an’  _walked_  after takin’ three rounds’a buckshot to the trunk?”

Beth swallows a burning surge of nausea. “We could leave an anonymous tip?”

He snaps the gun’s barrel back into place. “An’ have forensics trace those slugs back to my gun? No fuckin’ way.”

For a second, incredulity overtakes Beth’s panic. “Is it even  _registered_?”

She decides to take Daryl’s heavy silence as a no.

Beth’s eyes are starting to burn, so she forces herself to blink. “What’re we—what’re you gonna do with him?”

Daryl doesn’t answer, and Beth turns to—she doesn’t know, possibly shake him until his teeth rattle—but then they both go stock still at the sound of rustling branches. At the distant chorus of moans.  

At the smell of rot that’s abruptly gotten much, much stronger.

Beth counts two, then four, then eight, and they just keep multiplying from there. They’re as slow as the first, but there are so _many_ of them, and the part of Beth that’s just woken up—the darkest corner of her lizard brain—beats itself against her higher consciousness and tries to tell her what those moans mean for her.

She doesn’t quite get it, but she understands this much: they mean trouble. They mean death.

“Shit,” Daryl hisses, gun dipping. “ _Shit_. Get in the cab.”

“But—”

“ _Get_  in the motherfuckin’ cab, Beth.”

Two more of those—those  _things_ stumble out of the woods, and Beth  _gets_ , grabbing her stray shoe as she goes and shoving it onto her foot. Daryl slides out after her and slams the tailgate shut, following so close on Beth’s heels that he’s practically stepping on her. He braces a hand on Beth’s butt and boosts her into the cab, and then he circles around to the other side while Beth struggles to wrap slick fingers around the door’s handle and yank it shut.

Her eyes land on the person—on the _thing_  Daryl killed. Its jaw hangs loose like it’s been unhinged.

A puddle of blood and gore forms a wet halo around its head.

Beth’s stomach heaves. She swallows convulsively and drags her purse into her lap, rooting around for her cell phone. She’s gotta—she’s gotta call someone—

Daryl slams his door and plugs the key into the ignition, shotgun propped across his thighs. He doesn’t even bother to buckle in before swinging onto the highway.

He’s going back the way they came.

“Where’re you goin’?” Beth holds her phone up to the light and squints at the screen. Dammit, no signal.  _Of fucking course_  there’s no signal. “Town’s that way.”

“So fuckin’ what?” Daryl puts on speed, and the truck’s old engine coughs and sputters. “That town don’t mean shit to me. I gotta get Merle.”

Beth clutches her useless phone. “We gotta warn people!”

The speedometer’s needle creeps towards eighty. “Girl, you saw them things back there. If there’s that many of ’em, the folks in town already know.”

The folks in town, maybe. But what about the folks who _weren’t_ in town? What about the people who’ve gone out for the night?

Oh, God.

Beth grabs Daryl’s bicep and digs her nails into a slab of muscle. “You turn this truck around right now! I gotta—I gotta find Georgia!” She’s gotta find Georgia, and she’s gotta get back to her family’s farm, and—God.  _God_. What if these things have already made it to the other end of town? Sure, they’re slow, but what if—

No.  _No_. One thing at a time. Her family’s safe behind their locked doors, but Georgia and Gordon could be cruising around the backroads. Could be doing it in a truck bed the same as Daryl and Beth, exposed and vulnerable to the monsters in the woods.

Daryl shrugs her off. “Your friend’s with her boyfriend, ain’t she? They got a car. I gotta find Merle an’ get the fuck outta Dodge.”  

Beth wants to jump out of the truck and go running in the opposite direction, but then she sees more of those things stumbling along the side of the road, and she knows she can’t.

Okay. _Okay_. She just. She just has to think.

“Can I use your cell phone?”

Daryl doesn’t even spare her a glance. “Don’t got one.”

Beth stares at him. “It’s  _2010_.”

Daryl’s lips twist. “Can’t you find a payphone or somethin’?”

“No, I can’t. The town ripped up all the payphones because  _everybody owns a cell phone_.”

Daryl makes an irritated noise, but he says, grudgingly, “Think I seen a phone at the roadhouse. You can use it after I find Merle.”

Beth knows it’s the best deal she’s gonna get, so she relents, collapsing back against the seat, heart knocking like a fist against her ribs. Her panties are soaked through, and her puffy labia rub together whenever she moves her legs, because, oh, right. She was having sex with this guy just a few minutes ago.  

Beth laughs, high and unhinged, and Daryl tears his eyes off the road to look at her like  _she’s_ the crazy one.

“What?” Beth hiccups. “It’s funny. I mean, at least I won’t die a virgin.”

Daryl’s eyes bulge in their sockets. “A  _vir_ —” He cuts himself off with a round of cursing when something stumbles out into the road. He swerves around it, but not before his headlights illuminate blank golden eyes and rubbery gray skin.

They’re nearly at the roadhouse. That one of those things is wandering around this close to it isn’t a good sign.

Daryl waits until they’ve gotten past the thing on the road to snap, “You didn’t tell me you was a fuckin’ virgin!”

Beth checks her phone. Still no signal. “Didn’t think it was any of your business.”

“Like hell it ain’t. Losin’ it to some random guy in the back of a damn truck, who fuckin’  _does_  that?”

“Lots of people, probably,” Beth says, and Daryl cusses at her some more.  

Beth can see the hulking outline of the roadhouse, now, and beyond it, the fleabag motel. Daryl leans on the gas, then stomps on the brakes as he fishtails into the roadhouse’s parking lot. Beth punches out a breath and braces her feet like she’s leaning on phantom brakes.

“Holy fuck,” Daryl breathes, sounding like he might be sick, and, yeah.  

Because the parking lot’s teeming with bodies, a dense crowd of them that spills over onto the motel’s property, and some of them. Some of them are _eating_  the others.

At first, Beth can’t reconcile what she’s seeing with what she knows deep down, like her mind’s trying to protect her from reality, but that last inch of plausible deniability shrinks down to nothing when one of the monsters claws its fingers into a screaming man’s jacket, digs its teeth into his jugular, and tears off a strip of flesh with a spray of blood and gore that arcs across the truck’s windshield.

Numbly, Beth reaches over and turns on the windshield wipers.

A body slams into the passenger side door, and Beth cringes into Daryl’s side. Fingers claw at the window, trying to force their way through the crack, and Beth scrambles to roll it all the way shut. Daryl does the same on his side of the cab, cursing creatively under his breath.

“What’re we gonna do?” Beth asks him, because he’s the oldest person in this truck, and she’s still young enough to fall back on the nearest adult’s judgment.

Daryl doesn’t answer, just snaps off the windshield wipers and leans forward to squint into the early morning dark. Beth flinches when the thing outside her door slams itself against the window and flinches again when she hears a series of gunshots.

“Son of a bitch,” says Daryl, not like he’s upset, but like he’s marveling at something.

Beth strains to see out the windshield, leaning forward in her seat and looking over the heads of the mob. Something’s standing on the one-story motel’s roof. Some _one_. Someone’s up there, and they’ve got a gun, and they’re firing it into the crowd.

Holy shit.

Daryl shakes his head slowly back and forth. “That crazy bastard,” he says, then grabs the door handle like—like he’s gonna get out. Like he’s gonna leave her. “Stay here.”

Beth grabs his wrist, sweaty fingers slipping over his skin. “You can’t—” Actually, he damn well _can_ , is the thing. “Please don’t leave me.” She sounds pathetic, but that’s fine. Maybe he’ll feel sorry for her and stay.

Daryl looks like he wants to snap at her, but then his eyes flicker across her face, and something in his expression shifts. He tugs his wrist out of her grip, and she doesn’t try to snag him again.

“I ain’t leavin’ you,” he says gruffly. “I’m gonna get Merle, an’ then we can go look for your friend. A’right?”

Beth doesn’t know if she believes him, but she knows that she can’t make him stay. So she nods, and he nods, and then he grabs his shotgun and jumps out into the fray, slamming the door shut behind him. One of the monsters stumbles towards him, and he takes it out with a single headshot before sprinting in the direction of the motel.  

Beth watches him until she can’t see him anymore, and even then, she keeps straining her eyes for a glimpse. Praying that he doesn’t get taken down and eaten.

_Other_  people are being eaten, though. People are dying all around her, and she wants to help them, she wants to help them so bad she’s crying, but she can’t. She can’t, because she’s just one person and there are at least fifty of these things, and it’s killing her, and—

And the thing outside her door  _slams_ its face into the window, and the glass. The glass cracks.

Beth shrieks.

It presses its face against the cracked window, teeth gnashing, glass splinters piercing its skin, and it doesn’t even seem to feel any pain. It’s just gonna keep burrowing into the glass until the window collapses, and then it’s gonna get her.

That’s what her lizard brain was trying to tell her. That these are predators, and that predators eat people. It was trying to tell her that she’s not at the top of the food chain anymore.

Beth hugs her purse and glances frantically around, panting shallowly. The path beyond the driver’s side door is relatively clear but for a few of the things crouched around a slab of gore that used to be a person, and they seem too preoccupied with their easy meal to bother with Beth. But she can’t go out there, and she can’t stay in here, and—

And she’s not gonna wait in here to die. She’s not gonna be  _meat_.

She shoves her phone into her purse and zips it shut. Then she slides across the bench, flings open the door, and sprints towards the motel’s parking lot.  

Everything’s worse out here—the smell, the  _sounds_. Rot, and underneath that, fresh meat and coppery blood. Those hungry moans, the shrieks of the dying, the obscene squelch of rending flesh. Beth tries not to look at the slaughter, can only look forward, can only follow the sound of gunshots. Just a little bit farther—

One of the things stumbles into Beth’s path, hands outstretched, bloody mouth agape, and Beth shouts. It tries to dig its dirty fingers into her throat, and she doesn’t think. She grips her purse by the straps, hauls off, and sends it careening into the monster’s head.  

There’s a sound like a boot coming down on a piece of overripe fruit, and the monster stumbles back, but Beth swung too hard, and her purse goes flying out of her slick hands and off to one side, taking her cell phone with it.

Oh,  _fuck_.

Beth can’t go after it. She knows she can’t. Still, she hesitates, and that hesitance lasts long enough for the monster she whacked to get its bearings and come after her again.

Beth stops hesitating. She makes a break for it, stumbling over the median of scrubby grass that marks the boundary between the roadhouse’s parking lot and the motel’s.

There are fewer of the things over here, and Beth nearly cries with relief when she sees Daryl, beating a monster's head in with the butt of his gun while he shouts at the person on the roof.

“Geddown from there, you crazy motherfucker! You’re jus’ pissin’ ’em off!”

Merle whoops and hops off the roof, sliding down the motel’s overhang to stick the landing. “Was wonderin’ when you’d show up, lil’ brother. You missed all the fun.”

“ _Fun_ —” Daryl lets out a volley of cuss words that Beth’s never heard in that combination before, and Merle laughs like he’s having the time of his life.

Possibly because he is.

“You methed out right now? God fuckin’ dammit—”

Merle spots Beth, and the grin on his face grows wide enough to crack. “Well, how ’bout that. You gots yourself a lil’ tagalong, brother.”

Daryl finishes beating the monster’s head in and spins around, face twisting when he sees Beth. “What the fuck! I told you to wait in the damn truck!”

Beth just sprinted through a horde of things that wanted to  _eat her_  in ballet flats and a skirt. She is not. In the mood. “ _You’re_  the one who ditched  _me_!”

Daryl stomps closer, Merle following at a more sedate pace. “I didn’t fuckin’  _ditch_  you. Fuckin’ told you I’d be right back. You fixin’ to be some crazy fucker’s midnight snack? Huh? That what you want, girl?”  

Beth inhales sharply, trembling all over with fear and rage, but the furious scream building in her throat dies when Merle whistles for their attention.

Daryl glares at him. “ _What_.”

Merle scratches idly at his bristly cheek. “Hate to interrupt y’all’s lil’ spat, but we got ourselves a situation.” And he gestures towards the other end of the motel’s parking lot—no, at the copse of trees that borders it. Their branches shiver as they spit out one and then three and then seven more stumbling, hungry things.

If Beth hasn’t peed herself yet, she’s not going to now. She’s  _not_.

“ _Shit_.” Daryl’s already making a beeline for Beth. “Shit, shit, fuckin’  _shit_ —” He grabs Beth’s arm in passing, hard enough to hurt, but she really isn’t in a state to care. She wheels around with him, struggling not to trip over her own feet and collapse on her face.

Merle catches up with them, shooting one of the nearby monsters in the chest, and Daryl spits on the gore-smeared asphalt.  

“The  _brain_ , dumbass! It’s gotta be the fuckin’ brain.”

“Well,” Merle drawls, “ain’t _you_  a quick learner.” But he squeezes his handgun’s trigger and shoots the approaching monster in the head. Beth gives him a wild look, and he winks. “Nice t’see you again, honey. My lil’ brother been showin’ you a good time?”

This guy is  _out of his mind_.

They’re almost at the truck, and the thing that was trying to get in through the window is gone, possibly because there’s no longer anything inside worth going after. Worth eating.

But then Merle stumbles to a halt.

“Goddammit, my bike!”

Daryl looks like he’s gonna burst a vein. “We ain’t stoppin’ for your goddamn fuckin’ ugly-ass bike!”

But Merle’s already sprinting past the truck and farther into the parking lot, and Daryl swears at his retreating back before scooping Beth up with one arm and all but throwing her into the cab.

He points a warning finger at her. “Stay fuckin’  _put_. You get eaten, I ain’t savin’ your ass.” And he wheels around and runs after his brother.

Beth drags the door shut and twists in her seat to watch Daryl and Merle grab a monster of a bike and haul it towards the truck bed. They throw it inside—the truck bounces on its shocks—and then they’re scrambling into the cab, forcing Beth to slide along the bench to make room for Merle.  

Daryl starts the engine, and Merle takes a deep, conspicuous sniff. “Y’all smell like sex.” His rusty cackle grates in Beth’s ear. “Damn, baby brother. You finally bagged yourself a piece’a tail.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“She’s pretty, too. Too pretty for your grungy old ass, that’s for damn sure.”

“I  _said_ , shut the fuck up ’fore I feed you to one’a them things myself.”

Beth grabs Daryl’s arm. “Hey! You said you’d get me to the phone in there.”

All three of them turn to look at the roadhouse just as its front door collapses under the combined weight of half a dozen monsters.

“So much for that, huh?” says Merle. Beth makes a choked noise. 

Daryl does a U-turn and races for the parking lot’s exit, but it’s blocked off by a teeming wall of monsters who can’t seem to decide where to go. And there’s even more of the things out on the road, spread fifty feet in either direction.  

“Oh, hell,” says Beth. Daryl and Merle exchange a look over her head. Then Merle braces his hand on the dash.

Daryl revs the engine, then stomps on the gas.

Beth falls into Merle with a shriek, and he wraps his arm around her, tugging her into his side so her nose presses up against his armpit. Daryl and Beth aren’t the only ones who smell like sex, it turns out, which makes this whole thing even grosser than it otherwise would be. Normally, Beth would smack at Merle until he let go of her, but there’s no seatbelt for her to use, so she has little choice but to cling to his sweaty undershirt for dear life and pray that she doesn’t do a header through the windshield.

The truck slams through the group of monsters at the parking lot’s mouth, gore flying, tires bouncing across bowled-over bodies. Daryl turns a hard right and sends the truck careening through the monsters on the highway, and Merle whoops.

“This is nuts,” Beth realizes out loud. “This is nuts, this is nuts, THIS IS NUTS.”

Merle lets out another cackle. “Sure is, sugar tits! Makes you feel alive, don’t it?”

Beth’s nails bite into Merle’s flank. Daryl barrels past the last straggling monsters, but he doesn’t slow down even as he reaches a clear stretch of highway. He leans harder on the gas and races the truck into town.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You might have noticed that Daryl didn't make use of his trusty crossbow, and that's because he doesn't have it yet! Don't worry: boy and bow will be united soon. 
> 
> Thank you for reading ❤️


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hey.” Daryl’s flashlight beam wavers a little, so maybe he’s not entirely unaffected, after all. “If these things start off as people, then what makes ’em turn?”
> 
> It's a rhetorical question.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [But I knew I was out of luck the day the music died](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX_TFkut1PM). 
> 
> Am firmly convinced that Don McLean's creative process consisted of a read-through of Revelations followed by the world's biggest bong hit.

“The fuck you goin’, boy?” Merle hikes a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the way they came. “Town limits’re thataway.”

Daryl doesn’t answer—possibly because he’s preoccupied with swerving around a monster that’s wandered into the road, possibly because he just plain doesn’t want to. Regardless, Beth answers for him.

“We ain’t goin’ anywhere until I find Georgia.”

Merle looks at Beth like she’s a dog that just stood up and spoke English. “You been smokin’ the funny cigarettes, girl? We’re already  _in_ fuckin’ Georgia.” He laughs his rusty hacksaw laugh. “The fuck you think we are? Ala-fuckin’-bama?”

Now that he mentions it, Beth can’t help but wonder if this is happening in Alabama, too; if it’s spilled across county lines and over state borders, and then she’s got to  _stop_  wondering that for the sake of her sanity. “Not Georgia the state, Georgia my friend! Don’t you remember her? You were droolin’ all over her back at the roadhouse.”

Merle frowns like he’s trying to sort through all the  _other_  girls he’s drooled over within the last twenty-four hours. “Y’mean the redhead with the big tits?” he guesses, and Beth throws off his arm and scoots closer to Daryl. She’d rather go through the windshield than spend another second cozied up to Merle Dixon. 

Having confirmed Georgia’s identity in his own uniquely disgusting way, Merle reaches across Beth to shove at Daryl’s shoulder. “The fuck, boy? You out your damn mind? Lil’ missy over here that good a lay, you’d risk our fuckin’ necks for some bitch we don’t even know?”

The only thing that stops Beth from slapping Merle silly is her fear that he’d retaliate by wringing her neck like a chicken’s.   

Beth’s sitting close enough to Daryl that she can feel his growl vibrating in her ribcage. “You got a problem with it, you can hop the fuck on out an’  _walk_.”

Merle whistles. “One good fuck’s all it takes to keep you in line, huh? Your girl got a magic pussy or somethin’?”

Beth’s surprised that she has room left in her body for anything but primal fear, but she still flushes hot and cold with shame to hear Merle talk like that. To hear him put such a fine point on what Beth let Daryl do to her in the back of this truck. What she _actively encouraged_ him to do.

_Daryl_  doesn’t look ashamed, though, just pissed. He bounces his fist off the steering wheel, and Beth jumps, but there’s nowhere for her to cringe away to. “Shut the  _fuck_ up. Y’think I’s kiddin’ ’bout feedin’ you to one’a them things out there? ’Cause I fuckin’ wasn’t.”

Merle, who clearly has no self-preservation instincts to speak of, imitates the sound of a whip crack, and Beth decides to intervene before Daryl can make good on his promise to commit fratricide. There’s no love lost between her and Merle, but she doesn’t want Daryl doing something he’d regret on her account.  

“Uh.” Beth wishes she hadn’t spoken up at all when Daryl fixes her with a look that could curdle milk, but this is important, and she won’t let him intimidate her. “D’you even know where you’re goin’?”

They’re passing through a shopping district on the edge of town, strip malls lit up with blue and yellow neon, the odd car parked here and there, parking lots empty of stumbling monsters as well as screaming townsfolk. If they drive much farther without a destination in mind, they’ll have to turn back around. 

“Matter fact, I fuckin’ don’t,” Daryl’s saying, “’cause you didn’t fuckin’ tell me where we was goin’ in the firs’ goddamn place.”

Beth wants to be a smartass and tell him that he could’ve just asked, but she thinks better of it, lest Daryl decide to feed her  _and_  Merle to the monsters and have done with them both.  

“Well,” she prevaricates, struggling to think clearly through the panic swamping her brain. “I mean, they could still be out here somewhere, but they’re probably on their way to her house, or maybe his.”

Daryl eases off the gas a little. “Well, which is it?”

Beth weighs the possibilities. Georgia’s parents are stiflingly overprotective, but Gordon lives with his single dad who doesn’t pay much attention to his comings and goings, let alone who he brings home after curfew. If Gordon and Georgia want privacy, that’s where they’ll go.

Beth doesn’t even want to contemplate what’ll happen if she’s wrong.

“Gordon’s,” she decides. She raps out the directions, praying that Daryl and Merle have been in town long enough to get a handle on the general layout.

They must have, because Daryl nods and hooks a sharp left, and Beth has to brace her hands on the dash to keep her forehead from colliding with the stereo.

"Hey," says Merle, “if we’re gonna drive all over creation makin’ milk runs, we oughta stop an' pick up that buck. Be a real shame to let it go to waste.”

Daryl calls Merle a word that Beth’s never heard before, and Merle makes a noise like he wants to spit, although he thankfully doesn’t.  

“Man, it’s food! If the world’s goin’ to shit, we best stock up on necessities, ’less you wanna Donner Party the lil’ miss over here.”

“ _What_?” Beth chokes out, feeling like a rabbit with its foot in a trap as Merle looks her over, pale tongue skimming his lower lip.

“Prob’ly ain’t worth the effort,” he decides. “Too damn skinny.”

Beth wheezes, and Merle cackles, patting her shoulder like he’s trying to  _comfort_ her or something. “I’s jus’ kiddin’, sweet pea. Only one ’round here fixin’ t’eat ya is Daryl. Ain’t that right, boy?”

Daryl clenches his jaw. It’s hard to tell in this light, but Beth thinks his ears might be turning red. Hers are too, probably.

Merle  _does_ spit this time, and the glob of saliva he’s hacked up dribbles in rivulets down the dash. “Boy, don’t tell me you didn’t eat the girl’s pussy. Some man you are, ’fraid of a lil’ coochie.”

Riding a wave that’s one-part anger, one-part humiliation, Beth snaps, “Don’t you talk to him like that.”

Merle just laughs at her, but Daryl punches the steering wheel again and turns on her like a cornered wolf. “You shut your damn mouth. Don’t need you fightin’ my fuckin’ battles for me.”

Beth’s hackles rise. “And don’t  _you_  talk to  _me_  like that.”

Daryl audibly grinds his teeth, and Merle laughs again. At least  _someone’s_  having a good time.

“Whoo- _ee_. Your girl’s got a mouth on her, Darlena. Dunno about your pussy ass, but I can think of a couple dozen ways to shut her up, that’s for  _damn_  sure.”

“Y’all better fuckin’ quit it.”  

Merle snorts. “Or what? You’ll turn this car around?”

Daryl throttles the steering wheel, and maybe Merle’s got a kernel of self-preservation in his body, after all, because he finally shuts up and busies himself by fiddling with the radio. Mostly it’s just static, and there’s no music playing, just grainy news bulletins. Beth can’t make out much of what they’re saying, but it sounds like the governor’s declared a state of emergency.

Beth tears her attention away from the unhelpful radio broadcasts in favor of keeping an eye out for Gordon’s house. The sky’s lightening towards the east, but the night’s still murky enough that she nearly misses the two-story house with the mint-green siding. Hell, she might not’ve noticed it at all if not for the army of tacky garden gnomes congregated by the toolshed. Gordon’s dad has always loved those things, for some bizarre reason.

Beth slaps the dashboard. “There! That’s it—that one over there.”

Daryl’s already passed the house, so he has to throw the truck into reverse and back it into the concrete driveway. The garage door is shut, and all the lights are out, so there’s no telling if anybody’s home.

Please, please let someone be home.

The hair on the nape of Beth’s neck rises, and her skin prickles like she’s being watched, or hunted. She lifts her butt off the seat and squints out the windshield, and that might be a small cluster of drunks stumbling down the street in their direction, but tonight has proven beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt that she isn’t that lucky. 

Daryl taps her side. “C’mon.” He heaves the door open and gets out, and Beth follows, sticking to his side like glue and throwing anxious looks over her shoulder at the monsters making their cumbersome way down the street. Daryl stops by the truck bed to load a new magazine into his shotgun and clip a tactical light onto the barrel, and across the way, Merle feeds a fresh clip into his handgun. Then they’re off, trotting up to Gordon’s front door.  

Daryl and Merle stand with their backs to Beth, surveying the street while she mashes her finger against the doorbell.

“C’mon,” Beth mutters. The smell of rot is getting stronger, slicking along her palate and making her gorge rise. “C’mon, c’mon—”

“’Scuse me, lil’ lady.” Beth jolts when Merle nudges her out of the way, but she doesn’t question him when he tucks his gun into his waistband and slides what looks like a thin leather wallet out of his pocket. Beth can’t make out what he’s doing, but within less than a minute, she hears the click of tumblers turning over. They pile inside, shutting and locking the door just as the first of the approaching monsters sets its foot on the lawn. 

Beth blinks, pupils expanding rapidly as her eyes struggle to adjust to the foyer’s dim interior. It’s even darker in here than it was outside, on account of the heavy curtains on the windows.

“Georgia?” she calls, and Daryl shushes her.

“What?” Beth hisses. “How else am I supposed to find out if she’s here or not?”

“Could try usin’ your eyes,” Daryl retorts, and Beth clenches her fist.

“Y’all’re killin’ me here,” Merle gripes, shouldering past Daryl and stepping farther into the entryway.  

His boot comes down with a squelch.

All three of them look down at once, Daryl pointing his light at the floor—or rather, at what’s lying on it.

As for Beth, she can’t make heads or tails of what she’s seeing at first, like her brain’s trying to protect her. But maybe that’s not it. Maybe she just doesn’t have the context for this.

But her mind can only protect her for so long, and soon the thing it was trying to shield her from finds its context and clicks into place.

It’s a body, or at least, it’s something that  _used_  to be a body. It’s been chewed to bits, right down to the ribcage, right down to the gristle. Its skull is caved in, what’s left of its brain a messy smear on the floor, but Beth recognizes the face.

It’s Gordon’s dad.

His slippers are soaked in blood and viscera.

Merle whistles softly. “Well, shit. Somebody had himself a real bad night.”

Beth swallows convulsively, gut heaving. Then she turns her head to one side and throws up a thin stream of bile.

“Weak stomach, huh?” Merle commiserates, and Beth heaves and hacks up another round of the stuff, throat burning around the surge of acid. When she’s finished, she wipes a shaky hand across her mouth, then uses it to flip Merle off. His teeth flash, too white in the dark.

The thing is, though. The thing is, if Gordon’s dad looks like that, it means that the monster that made a meal out of him is probably somewhere inside this house.

How, though? The door was locked, and Beth doesn’t think those things are clever enough to pull a B&E.

“I’ll take a looksee upstairs,” Merle decides, sounding entirely unaffected by the mangled body at their feet. “Y’all stay down here an’ see what you can see.” 

Daryl nods, and Merle goes. The stairs don’t even creak under his weight, he moves so quietly.

Daryl fixes Beth with a warning glare. He’d probably shove a finger in her face if his hands weren’t wrapped around his gun. “You do what I say when I say it. You get eaten—”

Beth’s lips twist. Her tongue tastes like stomach acid. “You ain’t savin’ my ass. Yeah, I  _know_.”

Daryl looks toweringly unamused by her sass, but he turns wordlessly around and takes point down the wide hallway that splits the first floor in half. Beth wants to flip the switch that’s mounted on the whitewashed wall to her left, but what if the light attracts the monster that’s lurking around in here?

A hungry moan shivers through the air, and Beth’s heart clenches like a fist.

Guess it didn’t need attracting, after all.

A featureless shape stumbles out of the kitchen, fingers clawed, bared teeth flashing in the light coming off Daryl’s gun, and Daryl doesn’t even hesitate, just aims and shoots the monster square between the eyes. Beth clamps her hands over her ears too late, crying out at the noise, church bells clanging in her head. The monster goes down with a thud that shakes the picture frames on the wall, and Beth waits for the ringing in her ears to fade before edging closer.

Its belly is distended, packed with the meat it gorged itself on, and Beth looks quickly away from that obscene curve, eyes flashing up to its face.

Her breath stutters.

“No,” she says. “That’s—” She can’t say it. She can’t say it because she can’t be seeing what she thinks she’s seeing. She’s so out of it she’s hallucinating. That has to be it.

“What?” Daryl’s voice is unfairly steady, because he’s insane. “Y’all met before?”  

Beth swallows. If she had anything left in her stomach, she’d throw it up.

“That’s Gordon,” she whispers, mind trying to bend itself around this new reality. Trying and failing.

That fissure cracks wider.

“You surprised or somethin’?” Daryl doesn’t sound cruel, but neither does he sound particularly sympathetic to Beth’s plight. “You saw them things—you saw how they was all dressed like people. What, you think they wandered outta some lab somewhere an’ then stopped by the Gap ’fore gettin’ down to eatin’ folks?”

Beth clutches her stomach. “Was kinda hopin’ that’s how it worked, yeah.”  

People. They were  _people_. They weren’t just made. They didn’t just  _happen._  Somehow, some way, they started off as people before they became  _this_.

Gordon was an asshole and a deadbeat boyfriend, but he didn’t deserve this. No one does.

Daryl runs his flashlight’s beam across Gordon’s body, stopping at his neck. He nudges his boot against Gordon’s head, tipping it to one side, and Beth’s gearing up to yell at him about respecting the dead when she registers the wound on Gordon’s neck.

It’s a bite wound, and it looks nothing like any of the animal bites she would sometimes see at her dad’s clinic.

This bite was made with human teeth.

“Hey.” Daryl’s flashlight beam wavers a little, so maybe he’s not entirely unaffected, after all. “If these things start off as people, then what makes ’em turn?”

It’s a rhetorical question.

Still, Beth studies the bite, even though she doesn’t want to. She plants her hands on her knees and leans in closer, nose wrinkling at the smell. Blood leaks sluggishly from the wound, but that’s not all there is. There’s pus in there, too. If anything, it looks septic.

“It’s an infection,” Beth whispers.

Is this what that emergency broadcast from this afternoon was about? Not a new strain of swine flu. Something else. Something that no one’s ever seen before. Something that turns people into monsters.

“So, what?” Beth straightens up, pressing her hands against her uneasy stomach. “One of those things bites you and doesn’t kill you and—and you turn into  _this_?”

“Guess so.” Daryl retreats a couple steps, and Beth follows suit. If the infection’s transferred through bodily fluids, then it’s probably not airborne, but still, Beth abruptly wishes that those masks plague doctors used to wear were still in vogue.

She pulls herself out of  _that_  mental tangent to say, “What, like a vampire?" 

“Huh?”

“Y’know—” Beth claws her fingers and clicks them together like pincers. Like teeth. “A vampire bites you and _you_ turn into a vampire. Y’know, like in the movies.”

Daryl scoffs. “This ain’t no movie, girl.”

Yeah. Too bad it isn’t. If this were a movie, Beth could just turn off the TV and go to bed.

She glances around the hallway with half a mind of finding something to cover Gordon with—a coat, maybe, since she can’t go upstairs to fetch a sheet until Merle’s given them the all clear—but then the phone mounted on the wall catches her attention. She lifts the headset off the hook and carries it to her ear.

The line’s dead. Beth smashes her fingers against the keypad as if that will make a lick of difference, but it doesn’t, just like she figured it wouldn’t.  

She hangs it up a little too hard, and Daryl says, “Nothin’?”

Beth shakes her head.

“Yeah. Figured as much.”

“How come?”

“Everything goin’ to shit means  _everything’s_ goin’ to shit. Prob’ly won’t be long till they cut the power, too.”

That’s comforting. “Gordon and his dad had cell phones. They gotta be around here somewhere.”

Daryl nods at the thing that used to be Gordon. “Y’wanna check his pockets?” he asks, and Beth can't even tell if he's being sarcastic. 

A sharp whistle pierces the air, and Beth and Daryl spare poor Gordon one last look before heading for the stairs. Merle’s standing at the top, and Beth can’t see his face, but he doesn’t sound especially panicked when he says, “Think y’all might wanna c’mon up here.”

Beth rushes forwards, but Daryl beats her to it, shoving his body in front of hers. When they reach the landing, Merle wordlessly jerks his head to the left and points at a shut door.

“What is it?” Beth asks, even though she’s afraid of the answer. Please, please don’t let it be Georgia’s dead body—please don’t let it be a monster wearing Georgia’s face—

“Beth? Bethy, is that you?”

Beth’s heart stills for a fraught second before kicking back to life. She trips over her own feet on her way to the door Merle indicated, but when she twists the knob, it only turns halfway before getting stuck.  

It’s locked.

“Georgia.” Beth taps her fist against the door. “Georgia, it’s me. Open the door.”

“God, Beth. Thank fuckin’ God.” Even through the muffling door, Beth can tell that Georgia’s in or near tears. “Are there people with you? I thought I heard a man’s voice.”

Beth swallows thickly. “It’s just Daryl and Merle. Y’know, from the roadhouse? They’ve helped me out. They won’t hurt you.” Or at least, they won’t if they know what’s good for them.  

Merle tucks his gun into his waistband and wiggles his empty fingers. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Beth leans harder on the door. “See? It’s fine. C’mon, honey, open up.”

The lock clicks, and Beth has to back up before the door can collide with her nose. At first, all she sees is a blur, but then that blur clarifies into Georgia’s face. Her smudged eyeliner makes her look like a sad raccoon, and she’s clutching her left forearm with her right hand, but Beth only registers these things fleetingly. She flings herself at Georgia and hugs her tight, too relieved to stay pissed at her for earlier.

“ _God_.” Georgia burrows into Beth, nuzzling her damp face against the crook of Beth’s neck. “Goddammit, Beth, you scared me shitless.”

Beth clutches Georgia tighter, a breathless laugh bubbling up her throat. “ _I_  scared  _you_? I oughta kick your butt for ditchin’ me back there.”

Georgia’s breath hitches. “I’m sorry, Beth, I’m so sorry—”

Beth shushes her and combs shaking fingers through her sweaty hair. “It’s okay. It’s fine. I’m just glad you’re alright.” She pulls back far enough to look Georgia in the face, cupping her cheeks in her hands. “What the hell happened? How did Gordon—” She can’t say it.

Georgia’s lips wobble. “I dunno, I—we went for a walk in the woods, an’ then one of those—those  _things_  came up and bit him on the throat. We only got away ’cause it was real slow, an’ I’m the one who drove us here, ’cause Gordon was bleeding out all over the place, but a little while ago, he just—”

“Turned into one of them,” Beth says grimly. “We saw.”

Georgia’s eyes go wide. “Is he—”

“Daryl got him. He can’t hurt you now.”

Georgia’s face crumples like paper, fresh tears springing to her eyes. “I—I ran up here while Gordon was—while he was—with his daddy—” Her words stutter around a hiccup. “I don’t think they can climb stairs real well.”

“Hey.” Daryl shines his flashlight in Georgia’s face, making her flinch. “The hell’s that on your arm?”

Beth glances down. Georgia’s still clutching at her forearm, and she’s got a bundle of fabric—a t-shirt, maybe—wrapped around her wrist.  

And the t-shirt’s soaked through with blood.

Beth’s brain stalls.

_No,_  she thinks, over and over like a broken record.  _No, no, no—_

But she’s still got her hands on Georgia’s face, and she was too relieved to notice this until now, but Georgia’s skin is as hot as a blacktop during high noon in the summer. Hot like you could fry an egg on it.

Daryl stalks closer. “What kinda wound is that?”

Georgia cringes. “I—I don’t—”

“That boyfriend’a yours,” Daryl’s saying, relentless, and Beth’s never been as frightened of him as she is now. Not even when she thought he was a murderer. “He get his teeth in you after he turned? Huh?”

“I—he just—”

Daryl’s hand flashes out, and Georgia lets out a thin little scream, but all he does is tear the t-shirt off her arm. It comes unstuck with an awful tacky noise, and Beth.

Beth stares down at the impression of teeth. At the torn skin, at the dribbling pus.  

Daryl cocks his gun, and Beth flings herself in front of Georgia, heart rabbiting in her chest.

Daryl’s face does something complicated, but he doesn’t lower his gun. “Move.”

Georgia clutches Beth’s arm. “No,” says Beth.

The barrel wavers, but Daryl doesn’t lower it. “You really gonna make me shoot you?”

Beth sticks out her chin. Pretends that she isn’t practically pissing herself with fear. “You really gonna do it?”

Beth’s not stupid. She knows that she’s nothing but an inconvenience to Daryl, and that having sex once does not a relationship make.

But she also knows that he protected her when he could’ve dumped her by the side of the road.

“You dunno if the bite turns everyone,” Beth says. “We  _won’t_  know until it happens, and I’m not lettin’ you touch her until it _does_.”

Merle ventures closer, and while he isn’t pointing his gun at Georgia, the look on his face isn’t encouraging. “Counted at least a hundred’a them things, all told. If this shit spreads through bites, it’s gotta turn everybody every time—otherwise there wouldn’t’a been that many of ’em.”

Beth’s heart is stuck to her ribcage. “Somebody’s gotta be immune. That’s how disease  _works_.”

Daryl swears, heartfelt and vicious, but he lowers his gun, and Beth slumps like a balloon losing air.

But she can’t afford to relax just yet—or possibly ever. “Check under the sink for a first aid kit.”

Daryl jerks his head at Georgia, who’s leaning more and more of her weight on Beth. “Shit, girl, I can tell from here that the dumb bitch’s got a fever. Think it’s too late to go cleanin’ her wound.”

Beth grits her teeth. “ _Get_  me the damn first aid kit, Daryl.  _Please_.”

Daryl swears at her some more, but he goes, shouldering his gun and pushing past Merle. Merle doesn’t go anywhere, though, and it’s under his watchful eyes that Beth helps Georgia into Gordon’s room. It smells like cologne and dirty socks in here, but it also smells like blood. Georgia’s blood.

Merle leans against the doorjamb while Beth gets Georgia laid out on Gordon’s bed. “Kind thing to do would be to put the girl outta her misery.”

“Don’t  _you_  talk to me about what’s  _kind_ ,” Beth snaps, and Merle holds both hands up in surrender. When they drop, though, one lands on his waistband, fingers skating across the barrel of his gun. Beth swallows tightly and focuses on Georgia.

Georgia’s incoherent, mumbling _sorry_ over and over and not saying much of anything else. That’s not good. If she’s delirious, that means the fever’s running high enough to fry her brain, body working overtime to fight off the infection.  

Daryl returns and all but flings the first aid kit at Beth’s head. He tosses a bottle of pills onto the mattress, too, and when Beth squints at the label, she makes out the word  _Tylenol_.  

For the fever, Beth realizes. He thinks this is a waste of time, but he still brought her Tylenol when she didn’t think to ask for it.

“Um,” Beth says to Daryl’s retreating back. “Could you get me a glass of water, too? Please?”

Merle’s eyebrows go up, and Daryl mutters something rude as he storms out of the room. He comes back with a Dixie cup filled with tap water, though, setting it down on Gordon’s nightstand before leaving again.

Georgia’s too out of it to swallow properly, but Beth manages to get some Tylenol into her stomach by shaking them onto her tongue and massaging her throat. She cleans the wound as best she can and tapes it over with a bandage, and that’s it. That’s all she can do.

Beth breathes shakily out and curls up next to Georgia, stroking gentle fingers through her hair and humming a song she likes.  

“You gotta get better,” Beth whispers, pretending that Merle can’t hear her. “You gotta get better so I can kick your ass.”

Daryl comes back to tell her that he couldn’t find any cell phones, and Beth just nods absently, everything she’s got centered on Georgia. Daryl exchanges a few quiet words with Merle, then disappears down the hall again.  

“Maybe Gordon ate the phones,” Beth says to Georgia, wheezing out an unsteady laugh. She squeezes her eyes shut, trying to get a hold of herself, and when she opens them again, Georgia’s are fixed sightlessly on the ceiling.

There’s no light in them.

Beth holds her hand over Georgia’s mouth. No breath. Touches her throat, then her wrists. No pulse.

“She dead?” Merle asks. He’s standing right behind her. Beth didn’t hear him coming.

Beth feels like there’s a stone pressing down on her chest, squeezing the air out of her lungs. “I gotta—I gotta give her CPR or somethin’—I gotta resuscitate her—”

“What, so you can accidentally swallow some of her spit an’ turn? Hell nah.” Merle wraps an arm around Beth, hauling her off the bed. Her fingernails tear into his skin, but he doesn’t seem to feel it.

“Daryl!” Merle barks, right in Beth’s ear. “Come getcha bitch under control.”

Beth fights harder at that, but Daryl’s already appeared in the doorway. He looks from Beth and Merle to Georgia, lying still on the bed.  

“She’s dead,” Beth grits out, anger like a stopper for her grief. “Are you happy? She’s  _dead_.”

“Yeah?” says Merle. “Then why the fuck is she movin’?”

Beth whips her head around, heart in her throat, hope bubbling up like a spring. Georgia’s twitching on the bed, making quiet little raspy noises, and—

Daryl shines his flashlight in her face, and the beam reflects off her eyes.

They’re gold.

Beth’s scalp pulls tight as shrink wrap over her skull, goosebumps rising in a wave across every inch of her skin. Georgia makes another noise, but this one is louder. Questing.

Hungry.

Neither Daryl nor Merle say anything; Merle just hauls Beth out of the room, lifting her feet clear off the floor, and Daryl slams the door shut behind them. Merle drops Beth, but only to pull his gun out of his waistband and check the clip.

Beth jerks forward, but Daryl drops his gun on a side table and yanks her off her feet, pinning her to his chest.

Merle offers Beth his handgun butt first. “Y’wanna do her?”

Beth should, is the thing. Georgia’s her friend. She should be the one to put her out of her misery. She tries to get her hand to move, to accept the gun, but she can’t convince her fingers to unclench. She’s lost all feeling in them.  

Merle shrugs and turns, easing the door back open before pulling it softly shut, and Beth tries to claw free, but Daryl’s arms aren’t just for show, and he pins her in place like she’s no stronger than a newborn kitten.

Beth’s always hated guns. Even when they aren’t loaded, just the look of them is enough to make her nervous. It’s one of the reasons why she never asked Otis to teach her how to hunt.  

“Cover your ears,” Daryl mutters. He’d probably cover them for her, only he can’t let go of her waist. “C’mon, girl.”

Beth doesn’t cover her ears. She doesn’t, and even if she did, it wouldn’t make a difference. The blast’s too loud for it to make a difference, and when she hears it, she flinches like _she_  was the one who got shot.

She’s staring at the door, but all she can see are Georgia’s golden eyes, empty of the spark that once made them human.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you'd like to contact me, I'm on [Dreamwidth](https://gutsforgarters.dreamwidth.org/), [Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.social/gutsforgarters), and [Tumblr](https://mygutsforgarters.tumblr.com). 
> 
> And thank y'all so, so much for the support you've shown this story. It means more to me than I can say ❤️


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s everywhere, cocooning her; granting her the illusion of shelter, of safety.
> 
> Beth almost buys into the lie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [All our times have come](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClQcUyhoxTg).
> 
>  **TW** for intrusive thoughts and references to self-harm.

Beth drifts.

It’s not that she blacks out, exactly. It’s more like her brain is a camera, and it’s started taking snapshots of what she sees instead of filming everything in a continuous stream. She gets flashes of clarity—Merle coming out of Gordon’s bedroom with shuttered eyes and a frowning mouth like he’s finally, _finally_  grasped that they’re knee deep in shit; Daryl letting her go now that there’s nothing worth holding her back from; Daryl and Merle working together to wrap Gordon in a sheet and lie him down in the bed next to Georgia before shutting the door and sealing the crack with washcloths to block off the stink—but they never quite manage to string themselves into a cohesive, uninterrupted whole.

Not for a while, anyway.

 

* * *

 

The sun is hanging high in the east, and Beth’s standing in Gordon’s foyer and peering through a gap in the forest-green curtains.

She doesn’t remember how she got here.

She blinks, rapid fire like the click of a camera shutter, and her eyes come into focus.

The small cluster of monsters from last night has doubled, maybe even tripled, and they’re fanned out all across the street like an invading army that’s too stupid to get its bearings; some are solitary, but others travel in groups like packs of rabid dogs. One slumps on the curb in front of Gordon’s house, head bobbing like a fat rose on a too-narrow stem, dried blood caked in a crusty ring around its collar. Across the street, three of them rip into a body dressed in acid-wash jeans and a Budweiser t-shirt, gore dripping out of their gnashing mouths and splattering on the white, mica-speckled sidewalk.

Beth’s hand twitches, fingers curving as though to wrap themselves around the doorknob, and she stares down the length of her own arm like she’s looking at an alien object. Just what the hell does she intend to do? Go out there? Look for help? Offer someone else  _her_  help? With what? Even if the Dixons were inclined to let her borrow a gun, she wouldn’t know how to use it.

Voices rumble down the hallway, Merle’s louder than Daryl’s. Beth pivots on her heel with half a mind of finding out what they’re up to, only for her muscles to lock up at the sight that greets her, at the white sheet that’s draped across Gordon’s dad like a shroud, at the rusty red stains spreading sluggishly across its once-pristine surface.

Right. She remembers now. Daryl and Merle couldn’t seal him up with the others, because if they wanted to move him, they’d have to scrape pieces of him off the floor with a spatula. He isn’t so much a  _body_  as he is a collection of sloppy remains. Leftovers. Like something you’d scoop into a doggy bag to be taken home and microwaved later.  

Acid rises halfway up Beth’s throat, then recedes. Swallowing convulsively, she gives the lump on the floor a wide berth as she follows the sound of Merle’s voice to the kitchen.

But either they heard her coming and don’t want her eavesdropping on them, or there just happens to be a lull in the conversation as she gets closer, because the Dixons are silent by the time she steps over the kitchen’s threshold and onto the black-and-gray tile. Silent, but not entirely idle.

There’s a bag of Wonder Bread on the teak kitchen table, twist tie undone and discarded to one side, open jars of peanut butter and jelly flanking the loaf like bodyguards. Daryl’s perched on one of the two cushioned bar stools shoved flush with the kitchen island, head bent as he chews through a sloppily constructed sandwich. Merle’s got his chair balanced on its two back legs, dirt-caked boots propped on the tabletop, a half-eaten sandwich clutched in one hand and a knife slathered in grape jelly dangling from the other. As Beth looks on, he sticks the knife in his mouth and sucks it clean.

Merle licks his lips and points the knife at the loaf of bread. “Help yourself, lil’ missy. Still plenty to go around.”

Beth blinks. She can’t remember how to do much else. “You’re eating their food.”

Merle tears a hunk off his sandwich and swallows it in one gulp, not even pausing to chew. “Give the lady a stuffed monkey,” he drawls. “You gots yourself some mighty sharp powers of observation, there, honey, anybody ever tell you that?”   

The knife swings loosely from Merle’s fingers, back and forth like a pendulum. It’s a butter knife, and dull, but a person could probably force it into someone else’s eye socket if they were so inclined. If they applied enough force, they could pop someone’s eye like ripe fruit and turn _it_ to jelly.

Strawberry jelly, though. Not grape.

Beth should probably be upset that she’s having these sorts of thoughts. Maybe the violence she’s borne witness to is infectious, a spreading contagion like the thing that turned her friends into monsters.

“They’re dead,” she says, voice stronger than it was when she first spoke up, strong enough to crack through the stuffy air like a whip, “and you’re  _eating their food_.”

Daryl shifts on his perch, but it’s Merle who polishes off his sandwich and says, “Yeah, an’ so fuckin’ what? It’s like ya said—the poor bastards’re doornails. Won’t make no difference to them who eats their damn food. Survival, girl: y’can’t get precious about that shit.”

What gets to Beth, what  _really_  gets to her, is that Merle’s right: it won’t make any difference to Gordon who raids his kitchen or loots his house, because he’s dead, and he’ll never eat again. Will never go out for ice cream with Georgia. Won’t ever swing by the grocery store on the way home from school to pick up carbonated soda and mass-produced junk food.

How many other people are holed up in houses not their own right now? How many of those houses were already emptied, abandoned, and how many had their occupants forced out at gunpoint? Will people like that come up to this house with their weapons drawn? Because this is rural Georgia, and the folks around here are deeply attached to the Second Amendment, so  _of course_  they’ll have guns. And, yeah, by all accounts, the Dixons are armed to the teeth, but what if the invading force is comprised of a group larger than theirs? Will they be able to fight them off?

What if.

What if men with even fewer qualms than the Dixon brothers happen across her family’s farm? What if they run covetous eyes across her father’s fifty heads of cattle and decide that all that food is worth a price paid in blood?

“We gotta go,” Beth blurts, and Daryl finally lifts his head from his meal to watch her with narrowed eyes. “We gotta—we gotta get outta here; we can’t just sit around eatin’ PB&J sandwiches while everythin’—I gotta get back to my family—”

Daryl finishes his sandwich in two swallows and hops off the barstool, boots thunking on the floor like twin rolls of thunder. “Don’t gotta go nowhere. We gotta lie low until that shit out on the street blows over, is what we gotta do.”

Beth sinks her fingers into the folds of her skirt, pinching wrinkles into the gauzy fabric. “But—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Daryl snaps, and Beth cringes, fighting not to fold in on herself. Even Merle goes still, head cocked like a watchful animal’s. “It’s your fuckin’ fault we’re stuck here in the firs’ goddamn place, ’case you forgot. Bitchin’ about us eatin’ their food like it makes a goddamn difference, like it ain’t your fault me an’ Merle ain’t already on our way outta this hick town. Had to waste time lookin’ for your dumb slut friend for all the fuckin’ good it did you, you stupid little bitch.” 

Beth blinks, and tears spill over. Daryl makes a noise like he wants to spit and storms out of the kitchen, cursing under his breath.

She stands there for she doesn’t know how long, fists clenching and relaxing, blinking the tears out of her eyes until there aren’t any left. She scrubs her cheeks dry, and when she looks up, Merle’s watching her, contemplative, still twirling that butter knife between his fingers.

 _He_  probably knows how to kill someone with it.

“He always was the sweet one, my brother.” Merle sounds like he’s talking more to himself than to Beth. “A real bleedin’ heart.”

That conniption fit Daryl just threw didn’t seem all that  _sweet_  to Beth, so she’s inclined to disagree with that assessment, no matter  _how_  decent he was to her earlier.  

“Boy thinks it’s his damn fault you’re stuck out here with us.” Merle’s smile turns lurid, eyes too keen, and Beth wishes she were more covered up, that she wasn’t stuck in a skirt that clings to her hips and only just hits her knees. “On account of he stopped to fuck you ’stead of takin’ you straight home. He wouldn’t’a bothered helpin’ you look for your friend otherwise, nosiree.”

Beth’s heart gives a convulsive squeeze, but she says, speculatively, “He tell you all that?”

Merle shakes his head. “Nah. He don’t gotta. I practically raised that boy. Know ’im better’n he knows hisself. He’s got a thing for strays. Always has.”

She should probably take umbrage at being compared to a pet, but the fight’s drained out of her. She just hovers there, arms banded across her chest, hugging herself because no one else will.

 _Daryl_  certainly won’t.

Merle drops the butter knife with a clatter and scoots his chair back from the table.

“Daryl’s right,” he says. “Best we lie low for the time bein’. We got ourselves food an’ shelter. Wouldn’t hurt none to wait an’ see if that mess out there clears up ’fore the day’s out.”  

Beth swallows the lump in her throat. “And if it doesn’t?”

Merle grins sharply. “Then I guess we’ll hafta see how many more beatings that truck’a ours can take.”

Going by the battered state of the Ford's fender, Beth suspects not very many. 

Merle squeezes her shoulder on his way out, thumb just shy of the curve of her breast. It says a lot about her current state of mind that she doesn’t immediately turn and knee him in the crotch.

“Better eat somethin’, lil' miss. Can’t have you losin’ too much weight. My brother needs somethin’ to squeeze while he’s fuckin’ you, an’ you don’t got much worth grabbin’ to start with.”

 _That_  pierces her cloud of apathy, and she turns on Merle with bared teeth, but he’s already well out of reach, laughing under his breath.

Beth looks at the loaf of white bread, at the jars of peanut butter and jelly. Her stomach clenches.  

She grabs Merle’s abandoned knife, rinses it off in the sink, and fixes herself a sandwich.

 

* * *

 

It doesn’t clear up.

Daryl and Merle risk a trip outside to grab their stuff from the truck, and Beth watches them do it with her nose pressed to the windowpane, fingernails scratching anxiously at the wall when one of the roaming monsters stumbles too close to Daryl with its dirty teeth bared. Merle shoots it in the head, and Daryl’s mouth contorts around an outpouring of cuss words that Beth can’t hear when the gunfire attracts the attention of some monsters farther up the street.

So, they’re dead, but they can walk, can see, can hear. It makes Beth wonder what else of them is left, if some of their soul remains even after they come back with gnashing teeth and blank eyes.

_The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done._

Is this Judgment Day? Beth never took Revelations very literally, but it’s looking more and more as if she should have.  

Daryl and Merle make it back inside unscathed and unbitten, and then Daryl tromps into the garage to siphon fuel out of the cars. That's practical, Beth supposes, in the same way that eating a dead family's food was practical. 

She spends most of the day standing by the front window like a sentry, calves aching, eyes gritty. The sun sets slow as molasses, and she might be imagining things, but she swears the monsters get more active at night, more _agitated_ , wandering aimlessly up and down the street when they aren’t crouching to pick strings of flesh off of dead people and animals.

Daryl and Merle drag a mattress down the stairs and lay it out on the living room floor, but Daryl makes Merle sleep on the couch, so Beth guesses it’s meant for her.

A peace offering, maybe? Or is Daryl just trying to keep her compliant by offering her someplace relatively nice to sleep? Is he doing this for her sake, or his? 

She doesn’t have the energy to overanalyze this. She slips off her shoes and lies down on the mattress without getting under the covers, head on one of the two thin pillows, knees hugged to her chest.

Merle’s out like a light on the couch, possibly crashing from that meth Daryl accused him of taking, but Daryl’s restless, pacing like a caged animal all through the house, circuiting the living room and peeking through the blinds before leaving and coming back again to repeat the process.

On his third circuit, Beth finally speaks up. “Could you sit still for a while? You’re givin’ me the spins.” She’s whispering, but not on Merle’s account: like she said, he’s out like a light.  

No. What she doesn’t want to do is make too much noise and draw any more monsters to Gordon’s house. They can hear, but Beth doesn’t know how  _well_  they can hear. Is their hearing better than a person’s? The same? Worse?

She pushes that aside and points her eyes at Daryl’s face. She can’t make out much of his expression, but there’s a scowl in his voice when he says, “So shut your damn eyes.”

Beth risks a deep sigh. So, he’s not getting the point. Fine: she’ll spell it out for him.

She pats the mattress, figuring that’s as clear a signal as any. “You should get some rest.”

Daryl taps his shotgun against his shoulder. Shifts from foot to foot, making the floorboards creak. “Ain’t tired.”

No, he’s riding an adrenaline high, is what he’s doing, but that just means he’ll crash hard when the wave recedes. “So don’t sleep. Just lie down and rest your eyes for a couple’a minutes.”

Daryl ventures closer to the mattress, moving too quietly in his heavy work boots. He falls into a crouch, face still in shadow.

“Hell’s it matter to you?”

Beth tucks her cheek against the crook of her elbow and shrugs with one shoulder. “You’ve kept me alive so far. Don’t figure you can keep doin’ that if you’re dead on your feet.”  

It’s not the whole truth—the whole truth is that she’s concerned for him, even if he doesn’t deserve her compassion after the awful things he said earlier—but she figures he’ll react better to practicality than to naked sympathy.  

Daryl doesn’t say anything, but neither does he reject her offer, so she wiggles back and makes room, patting the mattress again. He cocks his head and looks at her for too long before eventually setting his gun aside, and he doesn’t bother to take off his shoes before lying down with his back to Beth, disdaining the second pillow in favor of cushioning his head on his folded arm.

Beth huffs under her breath, rolling onto her side and putting her back to him, too. There’s a fireplace in here—not a real one, but the gas kind you turn on with a switch, fronted with mesh. There’s a brass poker in a stand off to one side of the hearth—purely decorative, she assumes.

For some reason, looking at that poker pisses Beth off. It’s useless, and it’s not even pretty enough to be called art, so what’s the point? Decorative poker for a gas fireplace, and the idiot who decided it was worth the money is in pieces on the floor.

She sucks in a breath. When she lets it back out, it shakes like a sob, and maybe that’s why Daryl turns over to face her. She can’t see him, obviously, but she can feel him shift, can feel the mattress dip in the middle, can hear the old springs whine. She doesn’t look at him.   

Beth drags her fingers over the bedspread. It’s navy blue, and it’s old enough for the color to have faded a little. She digs her nose into it and inhales the wispy ghost of laundry detergent, but the smell isn’t strong enough to block out the metallic stink drifting in from the foyer.

She can’t smell Georgia and Gordon from here, but she knows they’re upstairs, laid out side-by-side in some sick parody of the aftermath of lovemaking.

Beth lifts her face from the bedspread and scowls at that stupid decorative fire poker, at this thing that didn’t matter before the world went nuts and definitely doesn’t matter now that it  _has_ , and she could just  _hit_ something. Could maybe hit herself, could claw her eyes out so she doesn’t have to look at that damn poker anymore.

If she doesn’t do something, she’s gonna—

Okay. Okay,  _stop_. Deep breath.

She inhales, dragging Daryl’s smell into her nose. It’s a heavy smell, ripe with sweat and the soap he used to wash his hands after hauling Gordon upstairs, and it settles over her like the blanket she isn’t using. She focuses on it instead of the old detergent clinging to the sheets. Instead of the smell coming out of the hallway.

Maybe he can give her something else to focus on. Something more tangible.

Beth squeezes her eyes shut and scoots backwards along the mattress until her hips glance off of Daryl’s pelvis. He doesn’t twitch away from her or shove her over the side of the bed, so she does it again.  _He_  doesn’t do much of anything, though. Hardly even seems to breathe.

She rolls her shoulders and presses her backside flush with his crotch, cheeks stinging with preemptive humiliation. He’s gonna reject her, and why shouldn’t he? All this violent death around them and here she is trying to start something like a horny teenager in a horror movie.

But then something glances off of Beth’s hip. Five somethings, actually. Daryl’s fingers. They ghost up her flank and settle into the dip of her waist, palm molding itself to the shallow convex curve, thumb digging into her back. He doesn’t relax, exactly, but he finally exhales, humid breath warming the nape of her neck, making the fine hairs stand up.

Oh. Okay. Maybe he figures that they might as well do this while they’re still breathing. And it’s not like she’s a virgin anymore.

Beth folds her hand over Daryl’s and slots her fingers through his, and then she drags that hand to her face and tucks his two longest fingers into her mouth, tasting traces of Dial soap and grape jelly. He presses his fingers down on her tongue so she can’t swallow properly around the pressure, making her drool all over his knuckles.

It’s gross, but Daryl must not think so, because he grunts against the nape of her neck and rubs his thumb against her jaw while she suckles on his fingers. She gets her other hand twisted in her skirt and rucks it up around her waist, and she pulls his fingers out of her mouth with a pop to guide them between her legs.

He tracks ropes of her own saliva all over her trembling belly before fumbling his way past her waistband, catching at her pubic hair and making her hiss. He hesitates at the noise, but she shakes her head and mumbles that she’s fine, and he angles his wrist and tucks his wet fingers against her slit, seeking her hood by feel.

It takes him a second, but he finds it and skims it back like he’s peeling a fruit, and her clit’s only halfway to hard, but those are a lot of nerve endings concentrated in one small place, so she still gets a shock to her system when he touches it.

Beth shudders. This is good. This is good. He’s gonna make her feel good.

His breath puffs across her ear, stirring wisps of her hair and making her skin break out in goosebumps. He drags his fingers up and down her lips and works her clit into a fat, slick nub, grunting when he plasters himself to her back and rubs his stiffening dick against her ass cheek. He’s everywhere, cocooning her; granting her the illusion of shelter, of safety.

Beth’s turned on enough now that she almost buys into the lie.

She’s turned on, yeah, but her body’s trailing two steps behind her brain, moisture dribbling sluggishly out of her slit, coming slower than it had last night—God, was it only last night?—and the friction of Daryl’s finger on her clit treads  _this close_  to painful. But even with the slight burn, it only takes a couple of minutes for her to start chasing the same feeling from before, pressure building in her abdomen like she has to pee, breath sawing in her lungs, ears full of the obscenely wet sound of Daryl’s fingers on her cunt. And, oh, God, Merle’s right over there, and even if he  _is_  fast asleep, he could still wake up at any second, and what was she even  _thinking_ —

The buildup was sharp, almost painful, so she’s not surprised when her orgasm comes sullenly, grudgingly, more of a flutter than a clench, but it still sends a rush of endorphins spinning through her system, still makes her heart seize, still oozes come all over Daryl’s fingers. Those fingers linger for a couple of seconds, like he wants to feel her orgasm, before pulling out of her with a squelch and settling low on her belly. She rolls onto her back, panting, and wraps her hand around his thick wrist.

“D’you wanna,” she starts, just as he mumbles, “Don’t got a rubber.”

Beth’s heart sinks, which is dumb, because it’s not like she hasn’t gotten hers, and it’s not like they can’t do other things. And she  _could_ try getting Daryl off with her hand, but that isn’t what she wants. She wants him _in_  her. She wants him to pin her to the mattress and chase his own high inside the slick clutch of her body.

She wants him to fuck the grief right out of her.

So she says, “It doesn’t matter,” and Daryl looks at her like she just offered to let him do her in the butt or something. Yeah, she knows how she sounds, because it damn well _does_  matter. Pre-ejaculate’s still got sperm in it, and that’s not even getting into STDs. Bad enough the dead are rising; getting the clap would be insult to injury.

Thing is, though—she doesn’t really care.

She _doesn’t care_ , so she slides her hand up his arm and skates her fingernails across his bicep, making his muscles jump. “It’ll be okay, right?” she asks from up close, so close that her lips graze the scruff on his chin. “You don’t got any—”

Daryl’s pupils are wide enough to eclipse all but two narrow rings of blue. “Nah.”

Beth’s already wrestling her panties down her legs. “So it’ll be fine.”  

He snorts. “Damn stupid.”

Beth doesn’t know if he’s saying that it’s stupid of her to trust that she won’t get sick or pregnant, or if he’s just calling her stupid in general. It’s probably for the best that she doesn’t ask.

But he must be feeling a little stupid, too, because she’s only just kicked her panties all the way off when he crawls half on top of her, one leg settling between both of hers, his hard cock digging into the hollow of her hip.

She whuffs out a breath. Lord, but the man is  _heavy_.

He rucks up her blouse and shoves the cups of her bra out of the way, dropping his head to suck a nipple into his mouth. It feels a little weird—slick suction, the edge of teeth where she absolutely _isn’t_  used to feeling teeth—but it’s the kind of weird that makes her toes clench and her cunt pulse, so maybe it’s not a  _bad_ weird.

He tucks his fingers between her legs and trails them across her oversensitive clit while he suckles at her breast, but he doesn’t seem to be in any kind of rush to get his pants undone, which is weird, because his zipper’s gotta be pinching something awful by now. Beth shoves a hand between them to wrestle with his belt buckle, but he’s pressed so close that her ribs ache from the weight of him, and she can’t make much headway. She huffs out a whine that echoes off the backs of her clenched teeth, frustrated enough to cry.

“Hey.” Her fingers glance off metal, but she can’t find purchase. “Can you—”

Daryl pulls off her nipple with a slurp, bracing one arm on the mattress and tucking his other hand between them to undo his belt and wrestle his zipper open. Beth tries to get a proper look at him, but she gets sidetracked by the sight of her own nipple, wet and red and stiff, and then it’s too late, because he’s pressing the head of his dick against her fanned-out cunt and inching inside.

Maybe it’s the new angle, or maybe she’s still sore from last time, but the stretch burns hotter tonight. Her legs quiver, and her cunt strains like new, untested elastic around the length of his bare dick. It’s too much, all of it, and she grunts so loud that Daryl swears under his breath and claps a hand over her mouth to silence her.

She stares up at him with wide eyes, breath puffing out of her nose to flutter across his knuckles. The fingers on her face are the same fingers he had inside of her, and she can smell herself on him, can feel the tackiness of her own release tracking along her cheek and jaw.

He glares at her in warning even as he sinks deeper into her cunt, but the glare melts away when he bottoms out, mouth catching around a choked-off noise of his own. She fumbles at his shirt’s buttons, wanting to feel more of his skin, but he stops her, grabs her wrist and nails it to the mattress like he’s pinning a butterfly to a corkboard.

Oh.

They both go still. Too still. Anyone looking at the picture they make right now would think he’s hurting her, and Daryl must realize it, too, because his mouth twists, and he shifts like he’s gonna pull out of her, but the movement drags his cock back and forth in the funnel of her cunt, and she twitches, thighs squeezing his sweaty hips, free hand coming up to clutch his wrist.  

She shakes her head. Mouths ‘it’s okay’ against his palm and hopes he understands.  

His eyes skitter away from hers. He drops his face into the crook of her neck, drags his dick out of her before fucking it back in, and it’s a good thing he’s got his hand on her mouth, because the noise she makes right then could wake the dead.

She almost laughs. Probably not a super appropriate metaphor to use these days.

The rhythm he works himself into is slow and deep but a little uneven, and he has to keep scrambling to readjust. Beth doesn’t have enough practical experience to call what  _he’s_ doing unpracticed, but it definitely isn’t anything like the smooth, tasteful love scenes you see in R-rated movies. That’s okay, though. She doesn’t want  _smooth_  or  _tasteful_. What she wants is Daryl, sweating on top of her as his musky smell sinks into her pores. What she wants is to forget the dead, if only for a few minutes.

She also wants to see his eyes while he fucks her, but he won’t give her that intimacy, keeps his face tucked into the curve of her neck, nipping at her with sharp teeth and licking the salt off her skin. He’s all around her: heavy enough to crush the breath out of her lungs, pubic hair snagging against hers, the dirty sound of him moving inside of her so loud it’s a wonder they  _don’t_  disturb Merle. Oh, God, Beth thinks she’d rather get eaten by monsters than have Merle see her like  _this_ , pinned to a mattress and getting her cunt stretched like a rubber band.

Beth huffs against Daryl’s palm, slack mouth tracking spit over his skin. She wraps her free hand as far as it’ll go around his bicep—which turns out to be not far at all; Jesus, it’s like groping a tree trunk—and hikes up her legs to plant her feet against the mattress. She clenches her cunt like she’s trying to push something out of it, like she’s trying to force his dick right out of her—although she’s not, Lord, she definitely is  _not_ —and Daryl’s groan shudders down her spine like a vibration down a tuning fork.

The feel of her clenching tight around him must be too much, because he twitches inside of her, and then he’s scrambling back on his knees to wrap a shaking hand around his dick. His  _dick_ , and Beth finally gets a good look at it: thick and wet, flushed a red so deep it’s almost purple, pulsing like a heart in the cup of his palm.

He jerks it, once, twice, and comes with a shudder, comes in hot spurts all over Beth’s thigh, painting her white skin whiter.  

He sways, and for a second, Beth’s afraid that he’ll collapse right on top of her, but he doesn’t. No, he rolls to one side and pants at the ceiling, face slack, eyes fluttering open and shut.

Beth comes slowly down from her endorphin rush, dripping wet all over the bedspread, thinking that she should wipe herself off before Daryl’s come can congeal on her skin. Daryl must be thinking along the same lines, because he moves before she can, skinning a case off its corresponding pillow and using it to clean her, and then himself.

And then he tugs up his zipper and rolls onto his side, facing away from her.

Beth stares at the flushed nape of his neck, incredulous. She feels a little—well, it probably wouldn’t be fair to say that she feels  _used_ , since  _she_  came on to  _him_.

It’s just—he didn’t even kiss her.

Well, what did she expect, anyway? Silk sheets and roses? She got what she wanted, and her friends are still dead. She still doesn’t know when she’ll see her family again.

Beth yanks her panties up, tugs her shirt and bra back down, and curls up on her side with her back to Daryl. At some point during the night, he shifts to face her. It’s not like he spoons her or anything, but she can feel him looking at her.

Eventually, she blinks out, lulled into a fitful sleep by the rhythm of their synced breathing.

 

* * *

 

**(day 2)**

 

Beth wakes up to an earthquake in progress, which is funny, because Georgia isn’t exactly a hotspot of violent seismic activity. So what exactly is going on?

“Goddammit, girl, get the hell up. You in a fuckin’ coma or what?”  

“Hey, Prince Charming—why don’t’cha try kissin’ her, see if that wakes her up?”

The earthquake rattles her teeth, and Beth opens her eyes with an unhappy moan. She blinks, struggling to bring the room into focus, fighting to bring her brain back online—

And then she remembers, all in a sickening rush, and she sits up so fast her stomach lurches. Daryl lets go of her shoulder and pushes to his feet, scowling down at her like she just insulted his mother.

“Wha’ happened?” she slurs.

“They’re gunning folks down in the fuckin’ street, that’s what’s happening,” Daryl snaps, and Beth realizes that both he and Merle have packs slung over their shoulders. Daryl tosses a third pack at Beth, and it smacks off her stomach and slides into her lap.

Gunning folks down in the street? What?

Beth pushes the pack off her lap, heaving herself to her feet and stumbling over to the window. The closer she gets to it, the clearer the noises coming in off the street become. At first, it sounds a little like somebody’s hammering nails, like one of the neighbors is getting their roof replaced. But that can’t be it.

She squeezes her fingers between the blinds and peels two slats apart.

Police cruisers line the street in either direction, some parked flush with the sidewalks, others angled to form makeshift barricades. Beth sees state, county, and local uniforms; sees bright white sunlight glinting off the black barrel of a gun. She sees stark-faced police officers shooting monsters in the head.

Not just monsters.

Across the street, a bloodied young man who can’t be much older than Beth is crawling on his hands and knees through a pristine expanse of lawn. Beth can’t tell if he’s been bitten, and the state police officer bearing down on him with her gun drawn doesn’t stop to check before shooting him between the eyes.

A hand fastens around her forearm and drags her away from the window.  

“This ain’t no spectator sport, girl,” Merle says, giving her a shake. “We gotta move our asses.”  

“We can’t just—they’re  _killing_  people—”

“Hey, y’think I wanna leave my truck behind?” Merle asks, as if that’s what really matters, here. “We gotta get gone ’fore them pigs out there break down the goddamn door.”

Would they, though? Would they really do that?

_A young man crawling on his hands and knees and getting shot at point-blank range._

Yeah, alright. Obviously, they would.

Right. Okay. Right. Beth retrieves her backpack, shoves her shoes onto her feet, and nods. “I’m ready,” she says, even though she’s never been less ready for anything in her entire life.

But this is survival. It’s like eating a dead man’s food. She might not like it, but she’s still gotta do it.

Daryl leads the way down the hall. “We’ll head for the woods out back. We can hole up in that huntin’ cabin we saw the other day.”

Merle nods as they burst out the back door and thunder down the deck. “Can circle back in a couple’a days, grab our shit an’ go.”

Beth wonders if she gets a say in any of this. Decides that she probably doesn’t.   

Gordon’s backyard is unfenced, and it’s a clear shot from the deck to the woods. No one’s getting executed back here, but there  _are_ a few monsters stumbling around, and one of them gets just close enough to bite Daryl before he unsheathes his Bowie knife and stabs it in the eye. A second monster claws at the grass as it tries to get to them. Its left leg is missing from the knee down.

Beth recognizes him: he’s a disabled vet. She wonders what happened to his prosthetic.

“Keep up, lil’ missy. Ain't no time for sightseein'.” Merle snatches Beth by the wrist, and she tears her eyes away from the monster crawling through the grass. She deafens herself to the slaughter in the street. She looks forward.

It’s the only way she _can_  look.

The trees close around them, muffling the sound of gunfire. Merle lets go of her wrist, and she stumbles over a root that sticks out of the ground like a varicose vein, but she doesn’t fall. Doesn’t turn her ankle over.

She keeps up. Even in her stupid impractical shoes, she keeps up, and she doesn’t look back.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Screw you. You don’t get to treat me like crap just because you’re upset. _I’m_ upset. I just lost my best friend. You hear me callin’ you names?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Don't think I'm ever gonna make it home again](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gmf4OVHhc9g).

Eventually, they slow from a run to a walk—not because they’ve lost their sense of urgency, but because the deeper into the woods they go, the denser the vegetation becomes. It’s kind of difficult to sprint full tilt when you’re worried that you’ll pull a George of the Jungle and collide face first with a tree.

Even so, it’s not a _leisurely_ hike by any means—they’re moving as fast as they can without running outright—and Beth has no idea what Merle thinks he’s doing when he slows to a sloping ramble, and then stops altogether. They are quite literally _running for their lives_ , here. What could _possibly_ be urgent enough to—

Merle unbuckles his belt, then undoes his fly.

Oh.

Beth was lagging behind the others, so she doesn’t have to double back after she stumbles to a graceless stop—but _Daryl_ does, and the white-knuckled grip he’s got on his shotgun suggests that he badly wants to beat Merle over the head with it.

“Fuck’s sake, can’t you hold it in for another couple’a minutes?”

Merle’s supplemented his handgun with a wicked-looking rifle, and he props it unconcernedly against the trunk of the sugar maple he intends to pee on before getting down to his business.

“Wouldn’t call the better part of an hour a _couple’a minutes_ ,” Merle drawls, sarcasm underscored by the raindrop patter of urine hitting a hard surface. Beth averts her eyes in a hurry; Merle might have his back turned to her, but she’s not about to chance glimpsing a part of him that she decidedly and passionately _doesn’t_ want to see.

Maybe Daryl’s decided that if he can’t beat them, he might as well join them. Maybe the sound of Merle peeing has triggered his own need to go. Either way, he slings his shotgun’s strap over his shoulder and wanders over to a hickory tree, hands dropping to his belt buckle. Beth’s eyes trail him for a second before snapping front again.

Oh, but she’s being _ridiculous_. It’s not like she hasn’t seen it before.

Yeah, well. That wasn’t in broad daylight, now, was it?

“Hey, princess,” says Merle, and Beth looks at him automatically, grimacing when he does that little shimmy guys do to shake off excess urine. “You gotta piss? Best do it now while we’re already stopped.”

Now that Merle mentions it, Beth realizes that she _does_ have to go, but not in the way he suggested.

 _Hell_.

“I’m good,” Beth lies, gripping her pack’s straps in a stranglehold and shifting from foot to foot—but then she forces herself still when her guts give an agitated twinge.

Hell. She’s in hell.

Merle zips up and turns to face Beth properly, rifle propped against his shoulder. “That right? Whatchu squirmin’ around for, then? Y’look like a goddamn worm on a hook.”

Beth scans the immediate area, actually kind of hoping that a monster will pop up from behind a tree and attempt to take a bite out of her. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be that many of them this deep in the woods, like they haven’t had the time to spread this far quite yet.

“You need ta take a shit?”

Beth gapes at Daryl, who’s finished his own business and is looking at her like he just asked her for the time and not the state of her bowels.

“ _Excuse_ me?”

Daryl doesn’t humor Beth’s righteous indignation, but she didn’t expect him to. “Can ya hold it in for another hour?”

Beth’s skin feels fit to sear right off, but the neutral look on Daryl’s face helps her pretend that he isn’t asking what he’s _actually_ asking. She considers the question, takes stock of how she’s feeling, then gives her head a defeated shake.

Merle drums his fingers against the barrel of his rifle, tapping out an impatient tattoo. “Christ Almighty, girl, ain’t nobody here who cares if you gotta take a dump. Jus’ dig a lil’ hole and do your business already.”

Beth hangs her head and stares at her feet. Her white ballet flats are smeared with thick stripes of red clay. She’ll never be able to get the stains out.

Not looking at either Dixon brother, she says, “Turn around.”

Only it doesn’t seem as if Daryl’s willing to grant her even this small modicum of dignity. “Your fuckin’ _modesty_ that important to you, you’d risk gettin’ bit on the ass by some freak while our backs’re turned? Fuck that.”

Beth blinks hard, struggling to dispel the tears that are standing in her eyes. She jerks her chin at Merle and says, “Then make _him_ turn around.”

Merle scowls, then spits in the dirt. “Shoot, girl, this ain’t no peepshow. You think I get off on watchin’ a woman take a shit?”

Beth’s well aware that she’s being ridiculous, clinging to this one small thing, but she doesn’t have much left, so she’ll be _damned_ if she folds. “Turn. The hell. _Around_.”

Merle opens his mouth—probably to call Beth some kind of awful name—but Daryl grabs him by the collar of his stained undershirt and spins him around like a top. Merle winds up cussing at Daryl instead of Beth, but he doesn’t turn back around, and Daryl keeps his eyes focused over Beth’s shoulder, presumably on lookout for approaching monsters.

He’s looking in her _direction_ , but he’s not looking at _her_. It’s a small kindness, and Beth knows it’s the best she’s gonna get.

So she sucks it up. She crouches in the dirt and digs a small hole in the earth, getting clumps of Georgia clay packed under her fingernails in the process. She feels like a cat in a litterbox when she pulls her panties down her legs and squats over her makeshift toilet, and for a too-long minute, she’s afraid that she’s too stressed to go—that she’s getting performance anxiety or something—but she does go in the end, shivering, scalding forehead pressed to her bare knee, eyes stinging with humiliated tears.

In that moment, part of Beth genuinely wishes that Georgia had gotten the chance to bite her before Merle could haul her off of Gordon's bed.

When she’s finished, she starts to pull her panties up her legs, only to be confronted with a rather pressing problem. “I don’t have anythin’ to—”

Daryl must’ve been expecting this, because he cuts Beth off by flinging a roll of toilet paper in her face, which she just barely catches before it can smack her on the nose. Beth doesn’t know if they already had this packed with them or if they stole it from Gordon’s house, and she doesn’t ask; she just cleans herself up and waffles over what to do with the soiled toilet paper before deciding to plant it in the hole along with her waste.

Beth stands up and cocks her foot, getting ready to kick a layer of dirt over the whole mess, but she freezes in place and wobbles stupidly on one leg when Daryl comes stalking towards her with his knife drawn. She’s about to ask him what he thinks he’s doing, coming at her like that, when she hears the hungry growl.

Beth whirls around, retreating up the shallow incline where Merle’s still standing, but Daryl’s already got his hand fisted in the monster’s shirt, knife going through its eye with a sound like fingers slicking through jelly. He yanks the knife free, letting the monster drop, and wipes the blade clean on a patch of vibrantly green grass.

Beth finishes covering up her waste, stuffs the roll of toilet paper into her pack, and trudges up the slope after Daryl, frowning down at her filthy shoes.

“Now, was that so hard?” Merle asks, sounding so much like he’s speaking to a small, stubborn child that Beth wants to hit him.

She doesn’t. She ignores him pointedly and touches fleeting fingertips to Daryl’s wrist. Fleeting, because he cringes away from the contact like she just put a cigarette out on his skin.

Whoa, okay. Don’t touch Daryl without warning. Got it.

“What?” Daryl asks, gruff but not mean. Maybe he’s feeling a little sorry for her.

Beth tucks her hands behind her back and says, “I dunno much about guns, an’ I’d probably wind up shooting myself in the foot if I tried to fire one. But I want to be able to defend myself.”

Daryl doesn’t reject her implicit request outright, which is something, and even Merle keeps his trap shut while his brother thinks over what Beth said. And she must pass muster, because Daryl hands her the Bowie knife he used to kill the monster with, then unsnaps the corresponding leather sheath from his belt and gives that to Beth, too.

Beth wraps her fingers around the knife’s handle and tests its weight, trying to get used to the shape and heft of it. The sunlight filtering through the treetops glances off the blade’s wicked curve and hits her right in the eyes, half blinding her.

“Y’know how to use that thing?” Daryl asks her.

Uh. “Stab with the pointy end?” She’s only mostly joking.

And she expects Daryl to scowl and huff at her, but the slant of his mouth makes her think that he just might be _amused_. “Yeah. Pretty much.”

Beth slides the knife into its sheath and holds onto it by the handle. She doesn’t have a belt to hook it to, so she guesses she’ll just have get used to carrying it. “Will you be okay without it?”

Daryl shrugs. “Got others.” He jerks his head in the direction they were going and starts walking. “C’mon. We’re burnin’ daylight.”

The nape of Beth’s neck prickles, and she turns to look at Merle, who’s watching her with narrowed eyes. Beth can’t even begin to guess what he’s thinking, and she’s too tired to try.

“What?”

Merle flashes her an easy grin. “Was jus’ wonderin’ if I should start placin’ bets on how long it’ll take ya to trip an’ stab yourself in the ass.”

Beth doesn’t buy a word of that, but she lets it drop. She holds the Bowie knife in a rough approximation of a backhand grip and tries not to make too much of a ruckus as she moves through the underbrush.

They’re burning daylight.

 

* * *

 

The hunting cabin’s nicer than Beth was expecting: it looks clean and lived in, and it’s even got a generator out back and a satellite dish planted on its red-tiled roof. You’d think she’d be happy that it isn’t some rundown shack with termites in the walls, but the niceness actually worries her a little, because the better the setup, the more likely that Daryl and Merle will want to stay put. Depending on the state of their own supplies plus whatever they find inside the cabin, they could conceivably stay here for days. Weeks. Weeks during which Beth’s family will worry themselves sick. Weeks of Beth not knowing whether or not this plague has reached the farm.

No. _No_. Calm down. Daryl and Merle will want to go back for the truck and the rest of their things that they couldn’t carry with them. It’ll be fine.

It’s got to be fine.

Merle picks the lock—it takes longer to crack than the one on Gordon’s front door—but Daryl goes in first, sweeping his tactical light all around the cabin’s dark corners while Beth strains up on her toes to peer over his shoulder. He whistles sharply a second later, giving the all clear, and Merle yanks Beth inside, fingers biting bruises into the flesh of her arm.

Beth shakes him off with a scowl. She’s getting real tired of being hauled around like a sack of potatoes, or worse, like that buck the Dixons killed.

“Jeezus _Christ_.” There’s a thump as Merle’s pack slides off his shoulders and lands on the hardwood floor. “That shit right there was enough exercise to last me a goddamn lifetime.”

“You need an oxygen tank, old man?” Daryl snarks, and Beth can’t see very well in the twilight dim of the cabin’s interior, but there’s no mistaking the silhouette of the hand gesture Merle makes in Daryl’s direction.

“You ain’t exactly a spring chicken yourself, asshole.”

Beth rolls her eyes at them both and starts feeling along the wall for a light switch. She finds one, but nothing happens when she flips it on.

Oh. Now that Beth thinks about it, the generator out back was silent. Maybe it’s broken, or out of fuel. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; if nothing else, a busted generator might mean that Daryl and Merle won’t be as willing to linger.

Still, a lack of working light fixtures ups the chances of Beth tripping over her own feet by an exponential degree, so she goes to twitch the curtains open, only for Daryl to shine his light right in her eyes and snap, “Leave them curtains be. Don’t want anythin’ seein’ inside.”

Anything, or _anyone_? Beth supposes it’s all the same to Daryl.

She holds her hands up in surrender, and Daryl shifts the light away from her eyes as he wanders farther into the cabin. Beth blinks rapidly, both trying to get her eyes to adjust to the dim and struggling to dispel the afterimages the flashlight beam painted across her vision.

From what little she can see, the cabin’s just one big room, with a kitchenette to the left of where Beth’s standing and a bed shoved into the far-right corner. There’s also a fireplace—a _real_ fireplace, not a gas one—a couch, and a television mounted on a stand. Beth can’t tell if that door over there leads to a bathroom, but there was an outhouse by the generator, so probably not.

Hinges whine, and Daryl says, “Hey. Come take a look at this shit.”

He’s almost certainly speaking to Merle exclusively, but Beth goes up to Daryl anyway. He’s opened the door Beth noticed, and it’s not a bathroom.

It’s a closet.

“Dumbass didn’t even padlock the damn door,” Daryl says.

Beth can see why a padlock might’ve been necessary. There aren’t any coats in this closet, but there _is_ a rack lined with shotguns mounted on the back wall, and every square inch of the floor is packed with boxes of ammo, some of which are stacked three deep.

Beth gets that this is a hunting cabin, but _seriously_? Whoever owns this place must have some legit issues.

Merle whistles softly. “Dunno if we can carry all that. Not without the truck.”

“So we’ll carry what we can,” says Daryl.

Merle’s already grabbed up as many boxes of ammo as he can carry. “Sounds like a damn fine plan to me,” he says, and then nudges his shoulder against Beth’s. “Make yourself useful an’ pack them rounds into your bag, lil’ miss.”

Right. Useful. She wants to be useful, doesn’t she? Doesn’t want Daryl to decide that she’s not worth keeping around. She steps into the spot Merle vacated, careful not to bump into Daryl, and slides her pack’s straps down her arms. She starts grabbing up boxes of ammo at random, not stopping to check brands or calibers as she stuffs them into her bag.

Daryl set down his gun and shut off his light when he found the closet, and Beth’s eyes have adjusted well enough to the dim by now that she can make out the shape of the weapon Daryl’s holding. It’s not a shotgun, or a handgun. It’s not any kind of gun at all.

Daryl hefts the crossbow and swings around to point it at the opposite wall, sighting down the stock. The way he holds it is familiar, easy, but Beth still asks, “You even know how to use that thing?”

It’s a joke, a teasing echo of what Daryl said to her when he gave her his knife. But either Daryl misunderstood her, or he’s just plain not in the mood for teasing, because he rounds on her like a cornered wolf.

“Think I’d be fuckin’ around with it if I didn’t know how to use it?” Daryl’s tone and posture make Beth want to cringe, but, no. You know what? She’s had just about enough.

So she straightens up and snaps right back at him. “I’ve already told you not to talk to me like that.”

Daryl’s pointing the crossbow at the floor now, and it’s not loaded, but Beth still gets the feeling that he kind of wants to shoot her with it when he says, “You best watch your mouth.”

Anger licks down Beth’s spine and settles in her gut, searing through the numb cold she’s been carrying around since Georgia died and came back right in front of her. “Screw you. You don’t get to treat me like crap just because you’re upset. _I’m_ upset. I just lost my best friend. You hear me callin’ you names?”

Beth expects a rude retort—from either Dixon—but Merle doesn’t interject, and Daryl just cocks his head at her, breath coming loud and agitated. Well, fine. Now that she’s got his attention, she’d best use it.

“You’re allowed to be upset,” she says, voice cracking like a sheet of ice, “but you can’t take it out on me—and don’t you _ever_ call me a bitch again, you hear me? That goes for both of y’all,” she tacks on, jerking her chin at Merle.

Merle whistles again, an admiring sound. “Well, _shit_. Your girlfriend’s got quite the pair of balls on ’er, lil’ brother.”

Daryl’s tongue collides with the back of his teeth, but he doesn’t bother volleying off a retort. Beth can’t make out much of his expression, but she gets the feeling she’s being assessed.

Then Daryl jerks his chin up and down, more of a twitch than a proper nod, and says, “I’mma go take a look at that generator. See if it still works.”

Well, that definitely wasn’t an apology, but something in Daryl’s voice suggested that Beth’s words made an impression on him, at least. They must have, or else he would’ve just called her some more names.

“Alright.” Beth shifts her weight from foot to foot. “Be safe out there.”

“Aw,” Merle croons. “You gonna kiss ’im goodbye, too?”

Beth flushes, and Daryl grabs a quiver of bolts out of the closet before turning away from her with a disgusted scoff. He smacks Merle over the head on his way out, and Beth suspects that the only thing that stops him from slamming the door shut behind him is a reluctance to make too much noise.

“Was it somethin’ I said?” Merle wonders from where he’s sprawled across the couch like some kind of lazy Roman emperor. Rolling her eyes, Beth heads to the kitchenette, skirting the little stamp-sized table on her way to the whitewashed cabinets.

The first cabinet’s stocked with cups and plates, but the second’s packed with snacks: Moon Pies, granola bars, a jar of peanut butter, even canned peaches. _Jackpot_.

Beth goes to grab the box of granola bars, then hesitates, thinking of the gun-happy owner of this cabin. Will they return only to find all of their food and weapons gone? Are they even still alive?

Well, Merle said that they can’t carry all those weapons, so maybe they won’t be able to fit all this food in their bags, either. They’ll just take a little, Beth decides, and then she’ll search for paper and a pen so she can write the owner a thank-you note.

“Y’know,” says Merle, and Beth’s hackles rise before he can even finish his sentence, “I’d really appreciate it if y’all kept it down tonight. A man needs his beauty rest.”

Beth squeezes the box of granola bars, fingers denting the brightly colored cardboard. She feels a little bit like somebody just grabbed her by the ankles and dunked her in an ice bath.

“You heard.”

“Only a lil’ bit,” Merle says, like he’s actually trying to make her _feel better_ , “right towards the end. I’m sure y’all did your best to keep it down, but there ain’t much you can do about the sound of a dick goin’ in an’ outta a wet pussy.”

Beth unclenches her numb fingers and drops the box of granola bars on the counter. Shuts her eyes. Breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth.

But of course Merle isn’t finished. Of course he isn’t.

“’Course, I dunno how willin’ Daryl’ll be to keep carryin’ on with ya once he finds out you’re a goddamn high schooler.”  

Beth’s eyes flip open, heart squeezing like a fist in her chest. She turns around, slowly, straining to make out Merle’s expression through the shadows that obscure it like a veil.

“How did you—”

Merle props his boots up on the low-slung coffee table. “Went through your friends’ shit after they died. Both of ’em were carryin’ shitty-ass fake IDs, but they had their real IDs on ’em, too.”

“You _went through their stuff_ —”

Merle raises a hand. “Now, honey, I don’t think that’s the real issue here, do you?”

No. No, Beth supposes that it isn’t.

“How old’re you really, girl? Don’t bullshit me, now.”

Beth swallows convulsively. “Sixteen,” she says.

“Mhmmm. Sounds about right.” Merle heaves a sigh. “Now, sixteen’s legal in the state of Georgia, an’ that’s all that matters to _me_.”

Beth is not the least bit surprised that Merle’s the kind of guy who memorizes age of consent laws.

“But Daryl? He gets real precious about that shit. I don’t wanna alarm you, lil’ miss, but if that boy finds out your real age, he’s gonna go nuclear.”

Breathe. _Breathe_. This isn’t even the worst thing that’s happened to her over the last two days. “Are you. Are you gonna tell him?”

Merle doesn’t answer right away—maybe he wants Beth to stew in her panic for a little bit. He heaves himself off the couch and wanders into the kitchen until all that’s separating him and Beth is the tiny table.

Beth eyes the long counter that separates the kitchenette from the rest of the cabin, feeling like she had at the gas station before Maggie came out of the convenience store to rescue her. The knife Daryl gave her is in the pack she left on the floor.

Daryl said that Merle wasn’t a rapist, and Merle himself said that he doesn’t force women, but—

“Naw,” says Merle, and it takes Beth a few seconds too long to remember what they were talking about. “Ain’t my business. I’mma leave that shit up to you—but if I could give ya a piece’a advice?”

Beth suspects he’ll give her that advice whether she asks for it or not, so she just nods, stiff as any marionette.

“Don’t tell ’im. You tell him your real age, he won’t wanna fuck you no more, an’ if he can’t fuck you, he jus’ might decide you ain’t worth keepin’ around in the long term. Y’know what I’m sayin’?”

Dread takes a leisurely trip down Beth’s spine. “Thought you said he was the sweet one.”

Merle shrugs. “Compared to me, he is, but, girl, you’re just another mouth to feed. Just another ass to cover, an’ it won’t be long before Daryl’s patience with ya runs out.” He flashes his teeth. “’Course, if he _does_ kick ya to the curb, you can always come to me. I’m a real charitable guy, an’ I never much minded takin’ sloppy seconds.”

Beth locks her muscles agonizingly tight, determined not to visibly recoil. “No, thank you.”

Merle doesn’t seem offended by her rejection, at least—just turns away from her and heads back to the couch. “Suit yourself, sugar tits. It’s an open offer, though, ’case you change your mind.”

“I won’t,” Beth snaps, but Merle just laughs. He does that a lot, like this whole messed-up thing’s no more fraught than a primetime sitcom.

So, what, Daryl’s just gonna dump her by the side of the road if he can’t have sex with her anymore? Merle’s suggestion wasn’t at all in line with what little Beth knows about his brother, but that’s just it, isn’t it? Beth met Daryl just a little over a day ago. Merle’s known him his entire life. Between the two of them, who would understand him best?  

Daryl probably doesn’t think Beth’s worth keeping around in the long term? Fine. There won’t _be_ a long term. Beth’s gonna convince these guys to take her back to her family, and then she won’t _need_ their protection. She won’t have to worry about any of what Merle just said.

A rumbling hum fills her ears, then, and Merle lets out a whoop.

“Y’hear that, lil’ miss? Your boy’s got us up and runnin’.”

Beth wants to say that Daryl isn’t her _anything_ , but she keeps her mouth shut. And even though being near Merle makes her skin crawl, she still goes over to the TV.  

She wants to hear what the news networks have to say about all this. Hopefully that dish on the roof gets a better signal than the truck’s radio.

 

* * *

 

**(day 3)**

 

“I told you I live on a farm, right?”

Daryl surprises Beth by actually answering the question. “Think your friend mentioned it.”

That’s another thing that surprises her—that he remembers anything Georgia said at the roadhouse at all. Skipping over a tree root, Beth says, “So we should go there.”

“Why the hell would I wanna do that?”

And then Merle gives Beth her third surprise of the morning when he says, “You got wax in your ears, boy? The lil’ miss said she lives on a farm. Farms got food. Land.”

“Wells and generators,” Beth adds, huffing a little under her pack’s doubled weight. Yeah, she’s strong from farm work, but this is a long walk. She also can’t believe that she’s allying herself with Merle, of all people, but if he wants to browbeat Daryl into heading for the Greene farm, far be it from Beth to stop him.

Daryl’s got one hand clamped around his new crossbow’s strap, but he uses the other to point a finger at Beth. “Don’t you live on the other side’a town?”

Beth doesn’t like where this is going. “Uh-huh.”

“So we ain’t goin’. Already made one detour, and fuckin’ look at how that ended.”

Beth squeezes her knife’s handle, then puts on speed, storming forward and swinging around to block Daryl’s path. For a second, she thinks he’ll just bowl her over and keep going, but he does stop, in the end, head lowered like a bull’s, eyes thin and flinty.

“You saw the news,” she says. “This is happening in other states. It’s happening in _Mexico_ and _Canada_. My family probably thinks I’m _dead_.”

Daryl’s eyes tick back and forth between both of Beth’s. He doesn’t say anything, and Beth’s not sure if that’s a good sign or a bad one.

“You met my sister,” Beth says, whispering even though she wants to shout. “Maggie. That’s her name.”

“Girl—”

“How would you feel? If you got separated from Merle? How would _you_ feel?”

Daryl opens his mouth, and a growl drifts into Beth’s ears. It’s not coming from Daryl.

Merle swings around, rifle coming up, but Daryl hisses, “Don’t.” Beth turns her head, slowly, fingers going slick on her knife’s handle, freezing like a snared rabbit when she spots the monster stumbling towards them. It’s a woman— _was_ a woman—and it’s wearing a blue sundress.

Daryl’s crossbow is already cocked, so he swings it up, aims, and fires. The bolt releases with a twang, and it hits the monster square in its left eye, killing it instantly.

Daryl goes to retrieve his bolt, and Beth shifts uncomfortably. God, she thinks she might have actually done what she swore she wouldn’t do and freaking _wet herself_ —

Wait. Crap.

Beth sets her knife down on the ground, then turns her back on Merle and Daryl, rolling up the front of her skirt and holding her panties’ waistband out from her abdomen. Oh, no. Oh, _fu_ —

“What, you gotta piss? Toldja you should’a used the damn outhouse ’fore we left—”

Beth snaps her underwear back into place and drops her skirt, scooping up her knife before turning to face Merle. He cuts himself off when he sees the look on her face.

He squints at her. “What?”

“I don’t have to pee,” Beth says, ghosting her hand over her abdomen. She’s always gotten mild cramps or no cramps at all, and she used to think that was a good thing; remembers that her mother was _happy_ to hit menopause because her PMS was always so bad.

Between that and the stress of the last two days, it’s no wonder she didn’t notice the symptoms, but still—

“Gotta take a dump?” Merle asks.

Mutely, Beth shakes her head.

Daryl glances up from where he’s kneeling in the dirt, biceps straining as he slots the bolt back into place and cocks his bow. “What’s the fuckin’ problem, then?”

Beth shouldn’t be embarrassed. She’s already gone to the bathroom in front of these guys.

But. Still.

“I got my period,” she whispers, and is greeted with absolute. Dead. Silence.

Eventually, Merle says, “Well, shit. ’Least you ain’t pregnant, huh?”

Yeah. Silver linings. “I think that monster must’ve smelled it or somethin’,” Beth mumbles, wishing that the earth would open up and swallow her.

“Don’t you got somethin’ to plug yourself up with?” Daryl wants to know.

“I _did_ ,” Beth snaps, “in my _purse_. Which I _lost_.”

Merle starts to grin. He elbows Daryl, who ducks away from the contact with a scowl. “How ’bout that, baby brother? You finally got a chance to earn your red wings.”

Daryl spits, but Beth doesn’t get it at first. Except then Merle keeps talking, and abruptly, _horribly_ , she _does_. “Yeah, I know. Shit sounds nasty as fuck. But it’s real fuckin’ slippery, wettest shit you ever felt, an’ the _taste_ —s’like eatin’ raw steak, once ya get used to it.” And just in case Beth and Daryl could’ve possibly misunderstood what he’s saying, Merle makes an obscene hand gesture and rolls his tongue over his lips with a slurp.

“Shut your damn mouth, you nasty old fuck.” Daryl shoves Merle hard enough to make him stumble, and Merle swears at him, but Daryl doesn’t pay his brother any mind. He slings his pack off his shoulder and starts digging through it, eventually coming up with a flannel shirt. He flicks open his buck knife and cuts the shirt into ribbons, then chucks the scraps at Beth.

“Those’ll do?” he asks her as he zips up his pack.

Flushing, Beth nods and turns around, folding a strip of flannel and shoving it into her panties like a makeshift pad before stuffing the spares into her bag. Her underwear’s already soiled, but there isn’t much to be done about that.

“Les’ go already,” Daryl says once Beth’s finished, but he doesn’t head the way they were going. No, he heads back the way they came.

“Where the fuck’re you goin’?” Merle demands, trailing in Daryl’s wake.

“The fuck’s it look like I’m goin’? Cabin’s closer than the truck. Can’t have the smell of her blood attractin’ more’a them things.”

“Man, my bike’s back there!”

“I ain’t gettin’ us killed over your goddamn bike.” Daryl looks at Beth over his shoulder. “You comin’ or what?”

Right. Beth shakes herself out of her daze and gets moving, the wad of flannel in her underwear grating uncomfortably at her labia with every step.

This is another three to five days lost, and the longer they have to hole up in that cabin, the less likely Daryl will be to take a detour to her family’s farm.

No. She’ll convince him to take her back to her family. Somehow.

She has to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing Merle's dialogue frequently makes me want to bathe in a vat of bleach, and this chapter was _especially_ bad in that regard. But I'm glad to be posting again, because I missed y'all. Thanks for reading 💖


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Thought you said you weren’t comin’ after me.” 
> 
> "Guess I lied."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [And driving down the road I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday, yesterday](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vrEljMfXYo). 
> 
> **TW** for suicide ideation.

**(day 7)**

Beth’s not wearing any underwear, and it’s definitely not as sexy as the smutty romance novels she sneaks past her dad make it out to be. She feels the worst kind of vulnerable, and she’s just _waiting_ for a strong gust of wind to flip up her skirt and flash her butt or crotch at _Merle._

But it’s not like there’s a whole hell of a lot she can do about it. She had to discard her soiled underwear back at the hunting cabin lest the smell attract blood-hungry monsters, and even if she _could_ endure the inevitable cracks about panty raids and ask Merle to break into one of the houses on Gordon’s street so she could loot herself some underthings, she wouldn’t. Beth has no way of knowing which houses are occupied and which aren’t, and even putting that aside, she can’t afford another detour, no matter how short.

Beth heaves her backpack into the truck bed and turns to survey the empty street, one hand clutched around her knife and the other fisted in her skirt, a preemptive strike against stray bursts of wind. She ought to be good, though, barring a freak breeze: the air is still and stale and hot, and while that may spare Beth from lasting embarrassment, it only exacerbates the stench of decay.

Because the street isn’t _actually_ empty. Empty of the _living_ , sure.

But it’s littered with the dead.

There are bodies everywhere she looks: lying supine on their lawns like they just stretched out for an afternoon of sunbathing and never got up, slumped on porch swings like Halloween scarecrows, smeared in pieces on the street like so much roadkill. Beth can’t even tell if they were people or monsters when they died for good, because most of them have been chewed down to the bone.

Do the monsters ever eat their own, if they’re hungry enough? Do they have that much in common with the living?

Merle tosses the last of their stuff into the truck and pats the roof with a discordant clang of flesh on metal that pulls Beth’s eyes away from the body in the Budweiser t-shirt (mostly just a t-shirt now, and some torn strips of denim like the monsters were too stupid or too hungry to differentiate flesh from cloth, just gnawed through fabric like moths in a closet).

“Alrighty, then,” he says, as brightly as if they just got done packing for a road trip to Wally World. “Guess that’s that. Hop on up, lil’ miss. I’ll give ya a boost.”

Beth thinks of naked rears and straying hands and says, “I think I can manage on my own, thanks.” She looks at Daryl, who’s casing the street with narrowed eyes, crossbow cocked and ready. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”

The crossbow dips, but only slightly. “You really think now’s a good time for a chat?” Daryl doesn’t sound pissed, though—or at least, no more pissed than usual, because he’s always at least a _little_ pissed by default.

And, no, now probably _isn’t_ the best time for a chat, but with the way things are—in the midst of what’s shaping up to be a fucking _pandemic_ —it’s looking more and more as if _good_ is at least temporarily off the table. There’s only _bad_ and _worse_ , and this street’s empty of threats save for a lone monster stumbling around stupidly in the distance, so, yeah. Now’s not an _ideal_ time for a chat, but neither is it the worst.

And Beth’s been patient. She suffered in silence for nearly _five days_ , because she doesn’t know Daryl well at all, but she gets the strong impression that he wouldn’t react favorably to being pushed. So she didn’t press the issue. She let him _think about it_. She held her tongue.

She’s done holding it.

Beth circles the truck bed and steps up to Daryl, halting just short of his half-raised crossbow, the point of that bolt aimed right at her stomach.

“Have you thought about what I asked?”

Daryl’s mouth is a thin, foreboding gash, but he doesn’t dismiss Beth out of hand. “Thought about it.”

Well, okay. That’s something. That’s more than Beth was expecting, even. “This is happening _everywhere._ It won’t stop even if you leave town; it’ll follow you wherever you go. Y’all might as well come with me.”

“That’s some damn fine logic right there,” Merle chimes in, and Daryl’s upper lip folds into a snarl. Oh, God. What if he says no out of sheer spite? Would he do that? 

Beth’s tongue feels like a dead hunk of meat in her mouth. It’s a struggle just to shape syllables, to string those syllables into words, but she does it. Somehow, she does it. “If—if y’all don’t take me there, I’ll just set out on my own.”

But the snarl on Daryl’s lip just gets steeper and bleeds into his voice. “What, you tryna blackmail me now? Make me feel bad about leavin’ you on your own?”

If only she were confident that that would work, maybe she would’ve tried. “No, I’m not. Y’all don’t know me. Don’t think it’ll make much of a difference to you what I decide to do with myself. I’m just statin’ facts. If y’all won’t take me to my family, then I’ll find them on my own.”

Her words are cavalier, but there’s not much she can do about the shake in her voice, because, what. Because she’s in a skirt with no underwear, and the only weapon she’s got is her knife—supposing Daryl and Merle let her keep it if she strikes out on her own, because it’s technically _their_ knife. Never mind the dead; what will she do if she runs into the worst of the _living_?

And, God, maybe she’s finally cracked, but she can practically hear Maggie chastising her in that way only big sisters can pull off, as clear as if she were standing right next to her.

 _Don’t do it, Bethy. Better to stick with these men and leave town than strike out on your own on a snowball’s_ chance _that you’ll make it back to the farm unscathed._

Merle pounds his fist against the truck’s roof, and the Maggie Voice dissipates like a mirage. “C’mon, now, boy. You damn well know this here’s the best offer we’re bound t’get. Quit bein’ such a stubborn ass an’ listen to what the lil’ missy’s got to say.”

Again, having _Merle_ as backup gives Beth a bad case of cognitive dissonance, but it’s not like she can afford to pick and choose her allies. “It’s out in the countryside,” she says, looking Daryl full in his ornery face, not even daring to blink. “Lotsa empty land, not a lotta people. Less people means less monsters, right? Less likely we’ll be to get bit.”

Daryl’s eyes skim down to slits, then flit to Beth’s left. He hefts his bow, and Beth hops back a teetering step just before he fires off a bolt. Then there’s that nasty wet sound she’s come to know too well, punctuated by a meaty thud.

She looks over her shoulder at the monster Daryl just killed. It’s the one she saw earlier; the one she dismissed as a minor threat. It got closer while she wasn’t looking. Too close.

Daryl retrieves his bolt, then swings around to point the gory end of it at Merle. “Fuckin’ _fine_. But if her daddy runs us off his land with a loaded shotgun, I’m usin’ _your_ sorry ass as a meat shield, you get me?”

Merle scratches his nose. “Fair ’nough,” he says.

Daryl stalks over towards the driver’s side door, stopping to settle the crossbow into the truck bed with more care than Beth’s seen him approach anything else to date. He catches her stare and scowls.

“The fuck you lookin’ at? Git in tha goddamn truck.”

Beth valiantly holds her tongue and gets in the _goddamn_ truck, side stepping Merle’s hand up in favor of scrambling onto the bench under her own power and setting the knife down in her lap. Daryl and Merle squeeze in after her, and she’s struck once again by how small a relatively roomy cab can become when you’re bookended by two big, sweaty guys who could frankly use a hot bath each.

At least no one _stole_ the truck while they were gone, although there are now bullet holes in the rear bumper. No, seriously. _Bullet holes_. 

Daryl backs out of Gordon’s driveway, and Merle starts fiddling with the radio. Like the last time Beth was in this truck, there’s no music playing: where there isn’t static, there’s emergency broadcasts urging people to go to Atlanta, to Fort Benning, to remain calm, to lock their doors and stay inside if they can’t evacuate immediately. Over and over, the same prerecorded messages rattled off in the same brisk monotone.

Beth tunes it all out and asks, “You remember how to get there?”

Daryl swings the truck around a body smeared in red streaks across the asphalt and grunts, “Uh-huh. Turn off the highway down Fairburn Road, right? Look for the mailbox?”

Daryl hooks a sharp turn onto the next street, and Beth braces sweaty palms on the dashboard. “The one that says _Greene_ on it, yeah.”

“ _Man_ ,” says Merle, apropos of absolutely nothing. “There ain’t nothin’ good playin’ on this radio.”

How is this guy a real person? “That’s because we’re in a _state of emergency_ ,” says Beth.

Merle pops the glovebox and starts thumbing through a collection of cassette tapes. (And, really? _Cassette tapes_?) “What’ch’y’all in the mood for? We got Motörhead, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin—”

“Merle, I think you need to get your priorities straight—”

Merle settles on a tape and cracks open the jewel case. “The hell you talkin’ ’bout, lil’ miss? Good music’s _always_ a priority.” He rams the cassette into the tape deck, and Beth recognizes the song that was playing when she first met Merle and Daryl at the gas station. Merle turns up the volume until Beth can feel the bass thumping in her skull, and she pinches her nose between her thumb and forefinger, trying to stave off the headache in progress.

One teeth-rattling song fades into another, and then another still, until they all bleed into one long line of noise. Beth shuts her eyes, not quite dozing—the music’s so loud that she couldn’t nap even if she wanted to—and she doesn’t open them again until the truck jerks to a halt.

“ _Shit_.”

Beth braces her elbow against the dash at the last second, hissing at the burst of pain that heralds a bruise. Daryl cusses again, and Merle echoes him as he dials down the radio’s volume like doing so will somehow help him to see more clearly.

Beth gets it, though, because the sight before them is startlingly mundane, wholly out of place in this new, feral world. She can’t quite believe what she’s seeing, either.

They’ve reached the highway, and both lanes are packed to bursting with cars all facing in the same direction—people are driving on the wrong side of the road, or they would be, if they were moving.

It’s a gridlock.

Daryl white knuckles the steering wheel. “There any other way of gettin’ onto Fairburn Road?” he asks Beth.

No, there isn’t. You get onto it from the highway, and it dead ends at her family’s farm. Beth shakes her head, and Daryl swears—not at her, it seems; just in general—before throwing the truck into reverse.

No. No, he can’t do this. “Wait—wait a second! Can’t ya just wait it out? It’s just a little further up—”

“ _Wait it out_ —girl, look around you! This shit look like it’s gonna clear up anytime soon?”

Thin lipped and shaking, Beth looks. Cars are sitting bumper-to-bumper, and quite a few of them have their doors hanging open, their passengers milling about with pinched faces and crossed arms. A few people are sitting inside their open hatchbacks, feet knocking against bumpers. Teenagers in a red Subaru Forrester are playing checkers.

They’ve been here for a while. Hours. A day?

Panic funnels up Beth’s throat, buzzes in her ears. “Can’t you at least ask around a little? Please?”

Daryl pounds the side of his fist against the steering wheel again, but he throws the truck into drive with a muttered curse and eases forward until they’re side-by-side with a white Jeep Cherokee. The passenger door is open, and Daryl rolls down the truck’s window and whistles for the occupants’ attention.

“Hey.” The woman in the Cherokee’s passenger seat looks up, face as wary as Beth’s must have been back at the gas station. “Y’all know how long it’s been like this for?”

The first woman exchanges a look with the lady in the driver’s seat, then says, “We dunno for sure, but it’s been like this since we got here. How long ago was that, now?” she asks the other lady.

The other woman tilts her wrist, and sunlight glints off a watch face. “Goin’ on five hours, now.”

Daryl doesn’t even bother thanking them, just rolls up the window and fixes Beth with a stony look.

Then he throws the truck into reverse.

“You can’t—”

“I sure as hell _can_.”

“We can—we can walk.”

Merle slings his arm across the back of the seat, jostling Beth. “And get our asses bit? Fuck naw.” 

Beth looks back and forth between Daryl and Merle, trying to gauge which of them is more sympathetic to her plight. “We walked to the huntin’ cabin and back.”

Daryl leans on the gas. “Only ’cause we had to. We got our truck now, an’ we ain’t leavin’ it behind.”

 _Don’t do it, Beth,_ says the Maggie Voice.

Beth doesn’t listen to it.

She shifts to face the passenger door, knees knocking into Merle’s thigh. “Stop the truck. I’m gettin’ out.”

Merle goggles at her, and Daryl growls, “The hell you say.”

“What’s it matter to you?” Beth retorts, reaching across Merle’s lap to curl her fingers around the door handle. “I’m just another mouth to feed. Y’oughta be glad to see me go.”

Merle’s eyebrows wing up at the way Beth takes his words from before and throws them back at him and his brother, but when she tries to push the door open, he grabs her wrist and squeezes a warning. “Now, lil’ miss, why don’t’cha sit still for a minute an’ think this over—”

“I _have_ thought it over.” And, you know what? If he won’t move, _fine_. She’ll just go _through_ him.

Beth heaves herself into Merle’s lap and pushes the door open, but he wraps an arm around her waist before she can hop out of the truck, snaring her. She makes a noise like a trapped animal and elbows him in the solar plexus, and he wheezes, but his hold doesn’t let up.  

“God fuckin’ dammit, girl, watch the merchandise—”

Beth yanks her knife out of its sheath and points the tip at Merle’s Adam’s apple. His lips part, but no sound comes out.

“The fuck,” Daryl grinds out, “are you _doin’_.”

Honestly? She has no fucking idea. “Let. Me. _Go_.”

“Alright,” says Merle, sliding his hands away from Beth’s waist and holding them up in surrender. “Go ’head. Ain’t no skin off my nose if ya get your ass bit. G’on, now.”

He’s the picture of compliance, but Beth still doesn’t take her eyes off of him for one second as she feels for the door and pushes it the rest of the way open. She hops out onto the cracked asphalt, Daryl’s shout ringing in her ears.

“You go out there, I ain’t comin’ after you!”

“I don’t want you to,” Beth says without looking at him, slamming the knife into its sheath. They didn’t ask for it back, so she’s keeping it.

Ignoring the looks the owners of the Jeep Cherokee are giving her, Beth ticks up her chin and starts hoofing it through the snarl of halted traffic. She must look like some kind of feral child, unwashed hair hanging in greasy strings from her wilting ponytail, wrinkles in her top, dirt on her shoes, the shadow of her pubis showing through her gauzy skirt. She’s past caring about any of that, though, every cell of her conscious mind devoted to finding a familiar face.

But between the blinding rays of sun bouncing off the metal bodies of cars and the crippling exhaustion blurring her vision, Beth’s having a hard time picking out individual features from the faceless mass that surrounds her, everything rendered in runny watercolor browns and beiges. A couple of those featureless blurs round on each other, getting into a shouting match that will probably escalate into a fistfight given time. She should put some distance between herself and _that_ violent altercation in the making, so she veers farther to the right—

“Beth? Beth, honey, is that you?”

And for a second—for a millisecond, even—Beth thinks that it’s her mom calling out to her, that her family fled an overrun farm and drove their Ford onto the highway, that against all odds she’s going to meet up with them here, that the traffic jam will dissolve and they’ll get away from all this—

“Beth?”

Beth pivots on her heel, too slowly, and looks up into a pair of anxious brown eyes that don’t belong to her mother.

It’s Mrs. Conway. She and her husband attend— _attended_ —the same church as Beth’s family, and they’ve got two little boys aged eight and ten. When Beth flickers a glance at the Conway’s white sedan and sees those two little boys tucked safely into the backseat, a tiny bud of hope sprouts inside of her.

If Mrs. Conway’s family made it out together, then so will Beth’s.

But Mrs. Conway’s still staring at her with those anxious eyes, so Beth clears her throat and tucks her knife deeper into the folds of her skirt before venturing closer. Mr. Conway’s still in the sedan’s driver’s seat, but Mrs. Conway’s standing by the open passenger door, arms crisscrossed tight over her stomach like she’s been gutted, like she’s trying to stop her internal organs from spilling out in a gory tidal wave.

“Beth.” Mrs. Conway uncrosses her arms, and her guts don’t spill out. She brushes her hands across Beth’s shoulder, nails catching at the split ends of her hair. “Honey, what the _hell_ are you doin’ out here all by yourself? Where’ve your parents gotten off to?”

Beth’s eyes burn, but not on account of the harsh noonday sunlight. “I was—I was out past curfew when all this started.” Because who cares that she broke curfew when the world’s going to pieces all around them? “I haven’t seen ’em since.”

The hands on Beth’s shoulders squeeze tight. “Jesus, honey. You’ve been out here all by yourself for a _week_?”

Not exactly. “Have you heard from them? My folks?” But the bud of hope wilts when Mrs. Conway shakes her head no.

“I’m sorry, honey. I tried callin’ ’em—tried callin’ just about everyone we know—but the phone lines are down, and our cell phones aren’t working, either.”   

Beth nods a little too hard for a little too long. “Alright,” she says. “Thanks.” She starts to turn away, but Mrs. Conway’s fingers snarl in her blouse.

“Honey, where’re you goin’? You should stay with us. We’re on our way to Fort Benning, and we can try and get in touch with your folks once we’re there—”

Beth hiccups out a wet little laugh. She gestures at the surrounding cars, forgetting for the moment that she’s still holding onto the knife. “This look like it’s gonna clear up anytime soon?” she asks, echoing Daryl almost word for word. “I can’t just wait around here. I gotta get back to the farm.”

“Honey, you can’t just—” Mrs. Conway blinks. “Is that a _knife_?”

Mr. Conway and their little boys are gaping at Beth through the rear windshield. Beth ducks her head and shakes Mrs. Conway off, pointing herself towards the woods.

“Beth! You get back here!”

Mrs. Conway’s shouting at her, but that’s all she does: shout. She doesn’t follow Beth. She’s got her own people to look after. She’s got her own family to protect.

And Beth needs to get back to hers.

She hops the railing and stumbles down the shallow incline that borders the woods and the road, stopping to check the position of the sun before she breaks through the tree line. Otis never taught her to hunt because she wouldn’t let him, but he _did_ teach her how to find her way without a compass.

Besides, she practically grew up in these woods, even if she never ventured this close to the highway. She knows their landmarks, and even if she _does_ get lost, she can always climb a tree and check the position of the sun again to reorient herself.

 _And if it gets cloudy?_ the Maggie Voice prods. _If night falls? You were never any good with constellations. Then what’ll you do?_

Bed down and pray, she supposes.

She just needs to find the road. If she can find the road before nightfall, then she won’t have to worry about the rest. For now, all that matters is finding the road.

So with the sun’s most recent position in mind, Beth heads in the direction of the road.

And, okay, yeah. She played in these woods plenty as a kid, if never this far out, but she always wore jeans and sneakers when she did. Boots, sometimes. Overalls. These flats aren’t suited to uneven terrain, and the underbrush keeps tripping her up. Twice, she almost loses a shoe. A minute after the second near loss, brambles scratch hot little lines across her bare legs and draw thin beads of blood. Beth cusses under her breath, thinking of the smell. Thinking of the things it might attract.

It’s not a lot of blood, though. Not nearly as much as you’d get out of a period, and maybe the smell of dirt and plants and animals will mask it. Maybe the monsters won’t be able to sniff her out over the funk of deer shit.

Animals. Beth can hear them scrambling around in the undergrowth, can hear birds calling to one another from tree to tree. Whatever this disease is, it doesn’t seem to be communicable across species, because she’s yet to see a dead squirrel get up and walk. That’s something. Humanity would be _really_ screwed if diseased killer bears started gunning for folks in droves.  

Beth shakes her head and refocuses, pausing on an open patch of land that’s too small to be called a clearing and checking the sun again. Okay. Okay, she’s still going in the right direction. She’s just gotta get to the road. Just a little farther—

A twig snaps. Beth tears her eyes away from the sky and looks back to Earth. Looks at what’s in front of her.

Something’s moving, something’s weaving through the trees. Not a deer, though. Not any kind of animal.

There’s just the one, at first, and Beth wastes a couple of seconds trying to decide whether she should attempt to kill it or hide behind a tree and wait for it to pass—but one turns into two, and two turn into eight, and then—and then Beth loses count.

She’s never seen this many at once before. Not even in the roadhouse’s parking lot, not even in the pack that Daryl ran over with his truck. Not even on Gordon’s street when the police indiscriminately gunned down both the living and the dead.

It’s a _herd_ , and it’s coming towards her. Like a tidal wave. Like a Biblical plague.

_Move. For God’s sake, move._

She should. She should’ve moved seconds ago instead of rooting herself to the spot like the final girl in a horror movie, but when people talk about fight or flight, they never mention the third option. The one where you freeze. The one where you shut down.

And then Beth has a thought. An awful thought. An ugly one.

What if she just _stayed_ frozen? What if she let them get her? Because if this thing keeps spreading, if the CDC can’t find a cure, or even if they _do_ find a cure, how long would she realistically last in a world like this one? She’s not Daryl or Merle. She’s not even Maggie. She wasn’t made for this.

Eventually, one of these things is going to get her and kill her and _eat_ her, so why not now?

_Because your family would be fucking devastated if you died, that’s fucking why._

Yeah, except they probably think she’s dead already. It’s been a week. Long past the point at which police stop searching for a missing person and start looking for a body. Her family won’t know the difference.

She could just lie down and let the monsters get her, trample her, tear her to slivers. It’d hurt at first, but the hurt would stop eventually. Everything would stop, and if she’s lucky enough, they’ll eat so much of her that there won’t be enough left to come back.

The monster at the head of the herd is maybe twenty feet away now, stumbling along a little to her left, mouth open, teeth clicking. It’s seen her. Smelled her.

But then it occurs to her that if they keep going, they’ll eventually find the highway, and that’s what snaps her out of her daze. She can’t be selfish. She can’t just stand here and let the monsters get her. She’s gotta get back to the road and warn people. She’s gotta tell them to lock themselves in their cars and wait the herd out and hope to God that these things don’t smash through their windshields the way the one at the roadhouse’s parking lot tried to do—

The monster at the head of the herd drops like a stone, splashes of blood painting brown bark red.

It’s got a bolt through its eye.

Beth was expecting it, but she still cries out when a callused hand snags around her wrist and _pulls_ hard enough to have her arm straining in its socket. The force of that tug has her stumbling around, has her spinning to face a glowering Daryl.

She doesn’t recognize what she’s feeling, can’t put a name to it, but whatever it is, it’s too big for her body. It strains at her seams like it could burst right through her skin.  

All she can think to say is, “Thought you said you weren’t comin’ after me.”

Daryl lets go of her, cocks his bow, and releases another bolt that finds its target with a squish. “Guess I lied,” he grunts, then jerks his head in the direction he came. “C’mon. We gotta go.”

Beth looks from Daryl to the herd, to what lies beyond it. Her family’s that way.

_Better alive and apart from us than dead and with us. Go._

Beth nods too hard, teeth clipping her tongue, and Daryl doesn’t bother retrieving his bolts—can’t—just wheels around and books it, Beth close on his heels.

But then she stumbles, crying out as one shoe slips off her foot and goes sailing into the underbrush. She twists a look over her shoulder, and they’re moving so fast, faster than she’s ever seen them move before. And they’re stumbling along like drunks, sure, sloppy and uncoordinated, but that doesn’t matter, does it, when you’re dead and you can’t get winded because you don’t need to breathe, when there are so many of you and only two of your prey, when all you have to do is wait for them to mess up just. The. _Once_.

Beth kicks off her other shoe with a curse and sprints barefoot after Daryl, hardly even feeling it when jagged rocks bite into the soles of her feet.

_Please, God. Please, please, please, God._

Daryl slings his crossbow over one shoulder and gropes blindly for Beth’s wrist, sweat-slick fingers slipping on her skin before digging in, too hard, and there are tears standing in Beth’s eyes, and she’s stupid, she’s so fucking stupid, she’s gotten them both _killed_ —

There’s light at the end of the tunnel, but not because she’s dead. It’s unbroken yellow sunlight, and they’re breaking through the tree line, they’re hopping the railing, and sunbaked asphalt is searing the soles of Beth’s feet.

“Monsters!” Beth shouts, but no one’s turning to look, no one’s _listening to her_. “They’re comin’, you gotta—”

Veins stand out in Daryl’s forehead, looking fit to pop. “Fuck, girl, you tryna start a fuckin’ riot?”

 _Mr. and Mrs. Conway_ , is all Beth can think. _Those two little boys._ “I’m tryin' to _warn people_ —”

“We don’t got _time_ for that shit.”

The truck. There’s the Dixons’ truck with Merle at the wheel, and Daryl’s shoving at the small of Beth’s back like he’s trying to boost her into the cab, but she stumbles to a halt and shouts across to the people in the Jeep Cherokee. “Y’all gotta get outta here. They’re here, they’re comin’ outta the woods.”

Beth can’t really see the woman in the driver’s seat, but the woman in the passenger’s seat turns white as bleached bone, and then Daryl grabs Beth around the waist before she can say anything else, hurling her into the cab before scrambling in after her and dragging the door shut.

“Sounds like we got company,” Merle says, mouth caught in a grim smile, and he doesn’t even wait for Daryl to buckle up before throwing the truck into reverse and spinning it around with a spray of loose gravel. The women in the Jeep seem to be arguing back and forth, but they aren’t moving. _Why the hell aren’t they moving_?

“Yeah.” Daryl braces his bootheel against the dash, crossbow cradled in his lap. “Should’a done what I said in the first fuckin’ place and gone tha other way.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Merle says, driving the wrong way down the road as the speedometer ticks closer and closer to ninety. “You can save the I-told-ya-so’s for later, huh?”

Beth twists around in her seat and stares unblinking out the rear windshield. The herd hasn’t broken through the tree line yet, but as Beth watches, a branch sways. It could be an animal. Could be a bird.

Beth knows it isn’t.

She looks away before the first of the monsters break through. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Beth keeps losing articles of clothing. I'd say a shopping trip's in order, wouldn't you? 
> 
> Thanks for reading 💖


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is an insane world they're living in. It only stands to reason that Beth would go insane right along with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I ain't no fortunate one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RmQTYLD398).

Merle maintains a stomach-lurching speed of eighty-five mph until they reach Peachtree City, and even then, he only slows when Daryl taps his fist against the dashboard and points at the Walmart Supercenter that’s looming in the distance like a post-modern monolith.

“Hey. Stop here.”

“What the hell for?”

“What you mean, _what the hell for_? Supplies, dumbass. An’ the girl needs some fuckin’ shoes. You want her to stub her toe an' get lockjaw?”

 _The girl._ It should bother Beth, the way Daryl and Merle are speaking around her like this, like she’s a small child too young to understand grownup talk so long as they’re vague enough in their phrasing. Lots of things should be bothering her right now. The rancid smell of sweat that clings to all three of them like a miasma. This hotbox of a truck cab. Not knowing for certain how many people got away from the herd of monsters that was about to overwhelm the stretch of highway they left behind.

(She’s seen a few cars pass them, including the white Jeep Cherokee, but only a few. Far, far too few.)

Merle wrenches the steering wheel and turns too sharply into the Walmart’s parking lot. He doesn’t bother with the turn signal, and why should he? Who’s gonna ticket him for breaking traffic laws, anyway?

Like Beth said, this Walmart’s one of those massive supercenters, the kind with a proper grocery store and an attached McDonald’s, and the parking lot is correspondingly huge. Huge, but mostly empty, like it’s the small hours of the morning instead of the middle of the day. As if the end of the world hit during a lull in business, or, more likely, as if the shoppers got emergency alerts on their phones and ran for it, ran for home, for their families.

Their families.

Merle parks at the curb by the outdoor nursery and kills the engine. He and Daryl hop out of the cab, and Beth follows suit, toes curling convulsively when her bare feet hit the hot pavement. She takes a mincing step towards the sidewalk, but then Daryl says, “Hold up.”

“What?” The pavement’s not getting any cooler, and Beth’s kind of in a hurry, here.

Daryl gestures at the ground—no, at Beth’s feet. “Y’can’t go runnin’ around like that out here. You’ll tear your feet up to shit.”

Beth’s pretty sure that her feet are _already_ torn to shit after her sprint through the woods. And, anyway, what does Daryl intend to do about it? Right now, Beth’s best option is to get inside as quickly as possible.

Thinking of getting inside, Beth looks at Merle, who’s stepped up to the automatic sliding doors. The sensors don’t go off, and the store’s interior looks dark through the glass panes set in the doors, so the power must be off. Merle mumbles something rude under his breath, then tucks his fingers into the seam between the doors and pulls them open with a muted grunt.

Looking back to Daryl, Beth says, “So what do you want me to do about it?”

Daryl looks at Beth like he didn’t actually think things through this far. He chews on his lip for a second, then slings his crossbow around so it rests against his chest. He turns his back to Beth and hunches down like a cat preparing to spring.

Says, “Hop on.”

It takes Beth way too long to understand what he’s saying, not because she doesn’t have the context for it, but because she couldn’t have ever imagined receiving the offer from _him_. She got plenty of piggyback rides when she was younger, from her parents and her siblings and Otis, but she’s not a child anymore, and Daryl—

Daryl’s, well. He’s _Daryl_.

And the incredulity Beth feels at being faced with this patently _absurd_ situation manifests itself in her voice when she says, “Are you serious?”

Beth expects Daryl to rescind the offer out of spite, but he just retorts, dry as dust, “Yeah, this's a serious piggyback. Jump up.”

Wobbling on her sore feet, Beth considers the strong slope of Daryl’s back, his cupped hands, his bent knees. Carefully, not wanting him to recoil and send them both sprawling, Beth braces her hands on Daryl’s bunched shoulders and _jumps_. He catches her, fingers digging into the undersides of her knees, tickling her without meaning to. He straightens up and bounces on the balls of his feet.

“You’re heavier’n you look,” he grunts as he starts for the Walmart’s open entrance, and Beth frowns at what she can see of his face—the shell of his ear, the sharp curve of a cheekbone, the corner of his mouth.

“If it’s too much for you, you can put me down,” Beth says, and that face tightens into a scowl.

“Girl, I’ve hauled bucks that weighed three damn times as much as you.”

Beth rolls her eyes. _Men_.

Merle’s waiting for them in the little vestibule that opens up into the store proper, and he smirks when he gets a good look at them.

“Shut the fuck up,” Daryl says before Merle can get a word out, but the smirk on Merle’s face just grows.

“Was jus’ gonna say that you been actin’ real fuckin’ chivalrous lately, baby brother. The lil’ miss must bring out the best in ya, huh?”

“Just open the goddamn doors,” Daryl snaps, and Merle shrugs and turns to do so.

Beth looks around while they wait, looks at the concrete floor and the dark vending machines, at the nested metal shopping carts. This is a Walmart Supercenter. They’re supposed to be open twenty-four hours. Not once since its grand opening has it been this silent, of that Beth’s certain. This… _dead_.

If the vestibule gave Beth an eerie vibe, what she felt out there is nothing compared to what she feels when Daryl carries her into the store proper. It was always big, but without the hum of background noise, and with nothing to illuminate it but the stray shafts of sunlight that filter in through the high banks of windows, it feels _cavernous_. It _is_ a cavern, now that civilization has retreated from it.

Far off, there’s the hollow trill of birdsong. A bird got trapped in here, the way they often get trapped in big buildings with high ceilings, and now there’s no one left to shoo it out. It’ll probably die soon.

Beth taps Daryl on the shoulder, and he lets her down. Her feet smack against the tiled floor, overwhelmingly chilly after the heat of the sunbaked pavement.

“The clothing department’s over there,” says Beth, pointing towards the dead center of the store. She’s been here before, but even if she hadn’t, she could have guessed at the setup. One Walmart’s much the same as another.

And now they’re all like this, she supposes. Empty but for picked-over shelves and trapped birds.

Daryl nods and swings his crossbow around, taking point, but Merle wanders off to the right without a word, heading in the direction of the pharmacy.

“Where’s he goin’?” It’s a stupid question. Beth suspects she already knows the answer.

“Prob’ly gonna go raid the pharmacy,” Daryl says, confirming Beth’s guess. “Prob’ly gonna steal some rubbers while he's at it, too.”

Beth outright _refuses_ to blush. “Oh.”

Daryl’s not looking at her face, at least. “C’mon,” he says, and Beth trails after him, bare feet smacking off tiled linoleum and eventually whispering across the thin carpet that lines the floor of the clothing department. They enter it through the men’s section, and Beth’s attention is briefly snagged by a gray t-shirt with the words _My Favorite Kid Bought Me This Shirt_ printed on it in navy-blue lettering.

Oh, right. Father’s Day was coming up soon, wasn’t it? Beth had been waffling over what to get for her dad before this all went down.

She blinks rapidly, eyes burning like she just stared directly into the sun. She swallows the pressure rising in her throat and devotes her attention to _not_ getting bit by any lurking monsters.

She doesn’t smell rot, at least. That’s a good sign, right? Or maybe her nose has just deadened itself to the smell. Nose blind. That’s a thing, isn't it? She’s pretty sure she’s seen Febreze commercials that used those words.

“Hey.” Daryl’s fingers snag in Beth’s top, reeling her to a halt, and she realizes that they’ve reached the juniors’ section. “Can you wear any of this stuff?”

“Uh.” Beth takes it all in: the skinny jeans, the skinnier belts, the t-shirts and blouses in shades of pink and purple. This used to be her normal. Now it feels like she’s looking at it all through a fun house mirror. “Yeah. Sure.”

Daryl releases her at that, and she steps up to a rack of t-shirts at random, flipping through them with more attention for size and comfort than cut and style. Who cares what’s cute and what isn’t? The outfit she’s _wearing_ used to be cute, before it got stained with dirt and sweat.

 _Cute_ isn’t real practical these days. Beth supposes that it never was.

She ends up grabbing a gray Rolling Stones t-shirt and a red flannel button-up—it’s hot, sure, but the nights are still chilly, and layering’s important, isn’t it, when you’re out in the sun a lot—and then wanders off towards the shelves of jeans. At first, she can’t find anything in her size, and sweat drips down the nape of her neck as she paws frantically through the piles of folded denim—but then she unearths a pair of dark Levi’s that should fit her alright.

Beth turns to Daryl, clothes piled up in her arms, knife dangling from her curled fingers. He’s chewing on his thumbnail and shifting from foot to foot. Antsy.

“You need anythin’ else?” He eyes her bare, dirty feet. “Other’n shoes.”

“Um. Socks.” She already snagged a belt on her way to the jeans. “And, uh. A bra and some underwear.”

Daryl turns and heads off towards the left, Beth trailing after him. She winds up grabbing some ankle socks patterned with little cartoon pineapples, a pack of cotton granny panties, and a sport’s bra. From there, they go up and down rows and rows of shoes, Beth trying to decide between sneakers and boots. Sneakers are easier to run in, but boots are sturdier, and Beth can’t seem to make up her mind.

Daryl drops into a crouch and examines the size offerings for an obscenely pricey pair of ladies’ Timberland boots. “What size you wear?”

“Uh.” Beth looks up from the Nikes she’s got cradled in her lap. They’re lightweight, and the canvas is patterned with pretty pink cherry blossoms on a sky-blue background. Sure, _cute_ isn’t a priority anymore, but if it’s cute _and_ practical, it’s fine, right? “Sevens?”

Daryl tosses a box at Beth, who scrambles to catch it, the Nikes tipping out of her lap and onto the floor. She lifts the lid and pulls out the left boot, that rubbery new-shoe smell hitting her square in the face, weirdly comforting.

It’s a _normal_ smell. It’s a smell that belongs to a world without monsters.

Beth pulls the cardboard insert out of the left boot even as she says, “I was thinkin’ about gettin’ sneakers, actually. They’re easier to run in.”

“Yeah, an’ they won’t do you no good in a fight. Skinny lil’ thing like you’s gon’ need a good pair’a shitkickers.” Daryl reaches over, taps the boot. “Feel that? Steel toes.”

 _A fight._ You don’t _fight_ a monster. You get away as fast as you can, and if you can’t, you put a bullet or a bolt or a knife in its head and _then_ you run before its friends show up. Daryl’s not talking about the dead.

He’s talking about the living. He’s talking about what the living might do to a girl who’s younger and smaller and _weaker_ than them.

“Okay,” Beth whispers, gathering everything to her chest and getting to her feet, Daryl following suit. “I think I saw changing rooms back there,” she says, indicating the direction with a jerk of her head.

Daryl squints at her. “Can’t ya just change out here?”

And Beth knows from the look on his face that he isn’t trying to wheedle a free show out of her. If she stripped right here, he’d probably turn his back to her. He’s just being practical: retracing their steps to the changing rooms means another few minutes wasted, and minutes are more precious now than they ever were.

But Beth says, “I don’t want Merle to see me gettin’ changed. He already—”

The squint morphs into a scowl. “He already _what_? That dirty old fuck been peepin’ on you or somethin’?”

Oh, hell. “He, uh. He heard us. That night at—at Gordon’s house.”

The color drains from Daryl’s face. “He fuckin’ _what_.”

Weirdly enough, Daryl’s reaction goes some ways towards making Beth feel a little bit better about all this. “He heard us. Y’know, when we were—you know. He told me so.”

That, and a few other things which Beth is firmly _not_ equipped to deal with at present.

“Shit.” Daryl scrubs a palm over his beard. “Jesus Christ. He say anythin’ nasty to you?”

Beth shrugs. “No nastier than usual. It’s fine.” Even though it really isn’t. “I just don’t wanna give him any more ammunition, y’know?”

Daryl huffs—Beth interprets the sound as one of agreement—and stomps off towards the changing rooms. Beth trails after him, juggling her knife and her change of clothes, ears pricked for approaching footsteps or hungry snarls.

The changing rooms are inside of a free-standing plywood structure placed smack in the middle of the clothing department, closest to the bras, socks, and underwear. Two changing rooms face each other, and sandwiched between them is a little alcove occupied by two white barrel chairs.

And then Daryl says, “Hey, Beth,” and Beth dumps her things in one of those chairs before turning to face him.

“Yeah?”

Daryl’s got the crossbow slung over his shoulder, having apparently decided that there’s no urgent need to keep it up and ready, and he fiddles with the strap as he talks. “Never said I was sorry. Y’know. ’Bout your friend. I know it don’t mean shit, but—”

 _Oh_ , Beth thinks. Just that.

 _Oh_.

“It does.” Beth’s lips wobble into a weak little smile. “It _does_ mean shit.”

Daryl nods, eyes pointed towards the floor. Towards the toes of his boots. “Yeah, well. I am. Sorry.”

Beth—

Beth’s feet propel her forward. They whisper across the scrubby gray carpet, and her arms reach out, slow, giving Daryl time to see her coming, giving him a chance to push her away. His narrow eyes pull wide, and he twitches when Beth wraps her arms around his waist and tucks her head beneath his chin, but that’s all he does, is twitch. He doesn’t reciprocate, but he doesn’t pull away, either.

He doesn’t pull away.

Beth’s missed this—hugging someone else. Just the simple intimacy of it, the comfort you can draw from feeling someone else breathe and hearing their heartbeat. Beth’s family was always touchy feely, and Beth, being the baby of the bunch, was always being held and snuggled, and it’s been a _week_ since she’s touched and been touched just because. Not for sex. Not because she was in danger.  

Just because.

“Thank you,” she mumbles, lower lip grazing the topmost button of Daryl’s shirt.

“…Don’t gotta thank me for that shit.”

But Beth shakes her head, the crown of her skull bumping Daryl’s blunt chin. “No. Not that.” Although that, too. “For comin’ back for me. You said you wouldn’t, but you did.”

Daryl shrugs, sways a little in Beth’s arms. He’s tense as a coiled spring, and Beth should really let him go, but she can’t. Not yet, because he’s warm and alive and he’s _human_. “Wouldn’t’a been right, leavin’ you like that.”

Beth’s lips curve. “Bet Merle wanted to.”

“Merle’s a jackass.”

Beth huffs out a laugh—a weak one, but a real one—and pulls back, arms slipping away from Daryl, and he relaxes, but she doesn’t step out of his personal space. She tilts her chin and looks him in the eye, and she doesn’t mean for it to happen, but she’s abruptly, viscerally aware that she’s not wearing any underwear, and that Daryl’s close, and that his hands once bunched up the skirt she’s wearing to grab her by the hips and hold her still while he fucked her in the back of his truck.

Heat flares between her legs, there and gone, dying like an ember faster than it ignited. But the fact that it was there it all. The fact that she felt _anything at all_ , if only briefly, is miraculous in of itself.

Something in her expression must shift, must give away her train of thought, because Daryl’s eyes flicker up and down her face, and he pulls his lower lip between his teeth, lashes fluttering against his cheekbones. Beth studies his face. It’s not a classically handsome face, even under all that grime, but it’s an _interesting_ one. Beth’s starting to like it.

She’s starting to like _him_.

But then Daryl retreats. Rubs the nape of his neck and mumbles, “Y’oughta get changed.”

Right. Okay. Yeah, she should probably do that. Cheeks prickling, Beth nods and retreats, picking up her clothes and walking into the changing room on her right. She pulls the door shut and boxes herself in, throwing the lock out of habit.

Beth very deliberately doesn’t look in the mirror as she strips down and gets dressed, tearing off tags and ripping open plastic packs, stuffing the spare panties into her bag. She knows she’s grimy, knows that she’s broken out, knows that her hair’s oily as all hell. Knows that she needed a shower, like, yesterday, except the hunting cabin didn’t have one. She rinsed herself off with the water in the kitchen sink, but that’s not the same.

She knows she looks like hell. The mirror can go fuck itself.

She’s crouching to lace up the expensive boots she won’t be paying for when she hears it. A voice. Not Daryl’s, and not Merle’s.

“Whoa, there, buddy. No need to be gettin’ hostile. Swear we’re friendly.”

Beth’s entire body clenches like a fist, fingers getting tangled up in her bootlaces, a chill flushing through her veins. A man. There’s a strange man out there, and, oh, God.

“That gun you’re pointin’ in my fuckin’ face says different.”

A gun. A gun against a crossbow, and Daryl might be an excellent shot, but _the other guy’s got a gun_. Only, Daryl’s got a handgun tucked into his pants, doesn’t he? Beth’s pretty sure that he does.

“What, this gun?” There’s a click like a hammer being slotted back into place. “See? We can do this nice and civilized. World’s goin’ to shit, but we can still act like rational folks, can’t we?”

Daryl doesn’t say anything to this, and in the silence, Beth considers the gap between the changing room door and the floor. It’s the kind of door you’d see on a bathroom stall, a good six inches of open space just _gaping_ there, and if the man—men?—out there were to get past Daryl and into the little alcove between the changing rooms, if they crouched down and _looked_ , they’d see Beth’s feet. Her legs. They’d know for sure that she’s in here.

Slowly, agonizingly, Beth climbs backwards onto the changing room’s little bench and crouches there. She finishes tying up her bootlaces, fingers thick and clumsy and fumbling.

“You here alone?” the stranger’s asking. “Thought I seen another guy come in here with ya.”

Unmasked hostility crackles in Daryl’s voice when he says, “You been watchin’ us?”

“Man, chill out. It ain’t like that. We just got here right after y’all, is all. Nothin’ creepy about it.”

 _We_. So there’s more than one of them. Great. Cursing her consistently rotten luck, Beth picks her knife up from the bench and unsheathes it, holding the naked blade to her chest right over her thundering heart.

“Saw the little girl, too,” another voice chimes in, and the hair on the nape of Beth’s neck stands straight up. “The one you was givin’ a piggyback ride to. She your younger sister or somethin’?”

“Whoa! _Shit_. No need to be pointin’ that thing in my face, now.”

“I dunno what you think you saw,” Daryl says, the edge in his voice sharp enough to cut, to rend, “but it don’t got nothin’ to do with y’all. Move the fuck on.”

“Hey,” says the second guy, “it’s a free Walmart.”

“Man, look at it from our perspective,” says the first guy, the spokesperson. “'Case you didn’t notice, the world’s gone down the shitter, an’ the law’s too busy gunnin’ down dead folks to pay much mind to the rest of us. Some folks might be inclined to take advantage of that, y’know what I’m sayin’?”

Beth’s gut ties itself into a knot, into a noose fit to hang her. She thinks back to what Merle said, how he suggested that Daryl might not bother with protecting her if he couldn’t get anything in return, and now this stranger is implying the same.

Daryl wouldn’t. He _wouldn’t_.

But Beth can’t think about that right now. She squats on the whitewashed bench, heart hammering in her ears, the handle of her knife growing slick in her sweaty grip, trying to decide what to do.

 _Just stay put, Bethy_ , Maggie whispers. _Stay put and wait them out_.

But that guy has a gun, and if Daryl keeps on stubbornly refusing to admit that he and Merle have a girl with them—which he’ll surely do—then he might be inclined to use it. If he believes that Daryl’s hiding a _little girl_ not because he wants to protect her from strange men, but because he doesn’t want to _share_ —

Beth ties the flannel shirt off around her waist, slips her backpack’s straps over her shoulders, and hooks her knife’s sheath onto her belt. She sets one foot after the other on the floor, heavy rubber bootheels thudding on tile. Holds her knife in a backhand grip and unlocks the door. Pushes it open and steps out of the changing room’s little alcove, coming up beside Daryl.

_Goddammit, Beth._

Three. There are three of them. Guy in the front with the revolver—pointed at the floor, at least—two other guys ranged out behind him, forming a little V like a flock of geese. The guy in the trucker hat is holding a naked buck knife, but the third guy with the blond mullet appears to be unarmed.

Okay. Alright. The odds just evened out a little. Probably. Maybe.

Daryl swore as soon as he heard her coming, but the guy with the revolver takes one look at Beth and smiles gently. Coaxingly.

“Hey there, honey. Thanks for comin’ on out. We was startin’ to worry ’bout you.”

He’s speaking to her like she’s a child, and that rubs her the wrong way. Turns her mouth into a frown when she wants to smile guilelessly, reassuringly. “Well, I’m fine. I was just gettin’ changed.”

Revolver jerks his chin at Daryl. “This fella right here. You with him ’cause you wanna be?”

Daryl’s shoulders pull up around his ears, and Beth lays a hand on his bicep. The muscles are knotted up hard beneath her palm, and Beth thinks, _Please, please don’t let your temper get the better of you. Not this time. Not right now._

_Please, God, let everyone keep it together._

“He’s my big brother,” Beth says, the lie coming far more easily than she thought it would. “So, yeah. Guess I am.”

The look Buck Knife gives Daryl is so incredulous that even _Beth_ feels insulted. “Y’all don’t look much alike.”

It takes everything Beth’s got not to clench her teeth. “We had different mommas.” Which is, you know. True.

Revolver nods, scrubs at his stubbly chin. “Y’all bedded down someplace nearby?”

“Nah,” says Daryl. He still hasn’t put down his crossbow. “Jus’ passin’ through. Seen this place an' stopped for some clothes an’ supplies.”

“So did we,” says Mullet. “Been on the run for days, now. Can’t stop in one place for too long ’fore one’a them dead things shows up an’ tries to eat ya.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Revolver agrees, raking his fingers through his thick dark hair. He blinks. Smiles. “Hey. Y’all wanna come with us? There’s safety in numbers, so—”

Daryl doesn’t even let Revolver finish his sentence before he’s saying, “Nah.”

“Hey, we ain’t gonna pull nothin’, if that’s what y’all’re worried about.” Revolver lifts his left hand in surrender, which would probably be more convincing if his right weren’t still wrapped around a gun, no matter that it’s pointed at the floor. “Ain’t gonna try nothin’ with your little sister, neither. Are we, boys?”

Buck Knife and Mullet both shake their heads, but with the way Buck Knife’s looking at Beth in short, shifty bursts, Beth’s not really convinced. And Daryl must not be convinced, either, because he says, “Already gave y’all my final answer. We’re fine on our own.”

And maybe it wouldn’t’ve escalated from there. Maybe Revolver and his goons would’ve backed off if not for what happens next.

If not for the click of a cocked hammer and Merle’s raspy voice saying, “Y’all jus’ lower your weapons, now, an’ don’t even think about tryin’ nothin’. Mine’s a helluva lot bigger’n yours.”

Revolver and his buddies freeze like cornered jackrabbits, and Beth freezes too, fingers petrifying where they still rest against Daryl’s coiled bicep. Merle appears from behind a rack of bras, rifle propped against his shoulder, one eye narrowed in a squint as he sights down the stock. Beth didn’t even hear him coming.

“Mother _fucker_ ,” says Daryl.  

When Revolver and his friends don’t move right away, Merle snaps, “C’mon, now. Don’t got all day. Put that there gun down nice an’ slow and kick it on over here, c’mon.”

Revolver does as he’s told, pivoting slowly and setting the gun down on the floor, kicking it over to Merle. Beth watches it skid across the carpet, watches Merle pick it up and tuck it into his waistband. Nodding at Daryl and Beth, he says, “C’mon, y’all. Let’s get movin’.”

Daryl leads the way, arm across Beth’s stomach, turning them sideways as they pass the men so he can keep his eye on them where they stand hunched like a pack of wary wolves. Beth doesn’t much like the look on Buck Knife’s face, and she _definitely_ doesn’t like the way his fingers are twitching on the handle of his weapon. Like he’s thinking about lunging and sinking it into somebody’s gut.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Daryl hisses once they’ve gotten past the guys and closer to Merle. “The hell you do that for?”

“The hell you mean, what I do that for? That fucker had a gun on y’all.”

Beth wants to _scream_. “The gun was _pointed at the floor,_ ” she hisses, slamming her knife into its sheath now that she’s out of immediate danger.

Merle makes a dismissive noise. “Whatever.”

Daryl jerks his head, swears, and goes storming off in the general direction of the exit. Beth follows, Merle bringing up the rear.

They’ve just cleared the clothing department when Beth hears the scuffle.

“Goddammit, Roland, don’t fuckin’ start—hey, you listen to me, asshole!”

The blast punches through Beth’s eardrums, has them flaring up hot like they’re gonna bleed, and she _does_ scream, high and thin, stumbling, thinking for a second that _she’s_ the one who’s been shot, and she braces herself for the pain—but there is none.

“ _Fuck_!”

Beth twists a look over her shoulder, watching as Merle goes down, face twisting with agony, because.

Because there was a second gun, and Beth isn’t the one who’s been shot.

“Shit!” Daryl wheels around, grabs Merle and hauls his arm over his shoulder, yanks him up off the floor. “Shit, fuckin’ _shit_ —” Daryl breaks into a run, dragging a violently cursing Merle with him—it’s good that he’s cussing, right? Means he isn’t dead yet—and Beth sprints after them, struggling to listen for the sounds of more gunshots over the ringing in her ears. There aren’t any, not yet, but Beth doesn’t think that matters. If she hears a shot, it’ll be too late.

“Beth!” Daryl tosses something at her, something that glints in the sunlight filtering in through the far-off windows, and when she catches it, metal teeth bite into her palm. Keys. Then the rifle, which she slings over her shoulder. “G’on ahead and start the truck!”

Beth falters, slows. “You want me to drive?”

A vein throbs in Daryl’s temple, so close to the skin that Beth’s afraid it might burst. “Of course I want you to fuckin’ drive! Jesus Christ, girl, _get your shit together_!”

Beth wonders if Daryl would be so insistent on her driving the getaway car if he knew that she only barely squeaked by in driver’s ed. But he _doesn’t_ know that, and Beth can hear footsteps coming after them now, so she nods and breaks into a sprint, streaking ahead through the first open set of doors, then the second, bursting out into the humid afternoon and blinking the sun out of her eyes, boots thundering on the sidewalk and then the pavement. Yanking the passenger door open, clambering onto the running board and sliding across the bench, tucking the rifle between her knees with the muzzle pointed at the footwell so she doesn’t accidentally shoot herself in the face. Keys plugged into the ignition, engine gunned, Daryl shoving Merle and then himself into the cab and dragging the door shut.

Revolver and his buddies burst out of the Walmart just as Beth throws the truck into drive and goes hurtling through the parking lot. Something pings off the truck bed. Bullets.

“Oh my God,” Beth whispers, fighting to keep the steering wheel pointed straight ahead, foot lead heavy on the gas. “They’re still shootin’ at us!”

“Yeah,” Daryl says, unbuckling his pack and dragging out an undershirt, which he wads up and presses against Merle’s—hip? It’s hard to tell from over here. “Some assholes just don’t know when to quit.”

Beth gets the strong impression that Daryl’s not just talking about those guys back there. The subtext must not be lost on Merle, either, because he musters up the strength to flip Daryl off.

“Suck my dick,” he grumbles. He’s sitting funny, leaning his weight on his left hip, and the placement of Daryl’s hand—

“Oh my God,” Beth repeats. “You got shot in the ass?”

Merle grits his teeth. The color is draining from his face at an alarming rate. “Seems like.”

“You.” Something funnels up Beth’s throat, fizzy like carbonated bubbles. Laughter. Unhinged, hysterical _laughter_. “ _You got shot in the ass_.”

Merle’s still white as a bleached sheet, lips pressed into a bloodless line, but then his eyes are crinkling, and he’s barking out a rasping laugh of his own.

Daryl gawks at them. “Y’all’re both crazy as _shit."_

Yeah, probably. But this is an insane world they’re living in. It only stands to reason that Beth would go insane right along with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...I guess you could say that those guys were a real _pain in the ass_.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The monsters, terrifying as they are, don’t seem to have any real malice in them. They’re just _hungry_ , and like any wild, starving thing, they attack available prey indiscriminately.
> 
> But people? People will shoot you in the fucking ass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I'm not the one you want, babe, I'll only let you down](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT4_jSUNzWw).
> 
> I am not a medical professional. This chapter contains a medical procedure. I did my research, but there will always be inaccuracies where firsthand experience is lacking. If _you_ aren’t a medical professional, don't try this at home. Don't try it anywhere. Go to a fucking hospital.

Beth isn’t laughing anymore. Neither is Merle, but only because he’s out cold, cheek cushioned against his brother’s shoulder, chalky skin shimmering with a thick layer of sweat. This is the fourth time that he’s passed out in twenty minutes, and every time it happens, Beth’s stomach clenches with the fear that he won’t wake up again.

Merle’s an objectively terrible person, and he brought this upon himself, but that doesn’t mean he deserves to _die._

Because, make no mistake, if they don’t treat Merle’s wound soon, he _will_ die, slow and ugly. Sure, your ass isn’t the worst place you could get shot, if you have to get shot at all, but there’s always sepsis to consider. If they had access to a hospital, Beth wouldn’t be all that worried.  

But they _don’t_ have access to a hospital. Beth saw the news. She saw what happened to the hospitals.

“Stop here,” Daryl tells her, just like he’d told Merle less than an hour ago when they passed the Walmart. “Pull into the driveway.”

They’re coasting down a residential street lined with dense growths of trees on either side, branches stretching out and interlocking to form a kind of roof. The house Daryl’s pointing at is two stories high, flanked by a pair of long, thin ranchers. The exterior walls are a faded yellow; the shingles and shutters are painted the same green as the leaves overhead. The front door is hanging open.

“The door’s open,” Beth objects even as she swings into the short driveway, nearly running the truck through the shut garage door before she manages to put it into park. The truck jerks to an awkward stop, and Merle’s head flops from Daryl’s shoulder onto Beth’s. His skin is alarmingly hot, like he just spent the last half hour baking in the sun. “Monsters could’a gotten inside.”  

“Think I can handle a couple’a dumb dead bastards.” Daryl shoulders his crossbow and jumps down onto the concrete driveway. Right before he slams his door shut, he adds, “S’the people I’m worried about.”

Beth supposes that’s fair, considering what they just ran from. The monsters, terrifying as they are, don’t seem to have any real malice in them. They’re just _hungry_ , and like any wild, starving thing, they attack available prey indiscriminately. 

But people? People will shoot you in the fucking ass.

Daryl appears on Beth’s side of the truck and hauls her door open, shoving the first aid kit and a plastic bag into her arms. “Take this. I’ll get Merle. You stand watch.”

Beth gets down and out of the way, and Merle flops across the bench like a ragdoll without a body there to hold him up. The toes of her new boots overlap a streak of pale blue chalk; somebody wrote the word _WELCOM_ in big block letters on the concrete driveway. Either the final letter washed away in a recent rainstorm, or the kid who wrote it was too young to have a good grasp on the nuances of spelling.

It’s as good an invitation as any.

Daryl drags Merle’s dead weight out of the truck and wraps his brother’s arm around his neck. There’s a small group of monsters stumbling around farther down the street, moving slowly but surely towards them. Curtains flicker across the way and fall still just as quickly, leaving Beth to wonder if she imagined it.

They aren’t the only three people left in the world, even if it sometimes feels that way. The incident at the Walmart proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

It says a lot about the person this world’s turning her into that Beth’s primary concern isn’t connecting with new people, but that those people don’t start shooting at her.  

“C’mon.” Daryl starts across the lawn, and Beth follows, forced to trot to keep up even though Daryl’s burdened both by his brother and his crossbow.

“Hey,” Merle mumbles, digging in with his heels. “Where’s the fire?”

“For fuck’s sake,” Daryl grouses, half lifting Merle off his feet, and, yeah. Only Merle Dixon could manage to be this annoying while bleeding out from a bullet wound.

On the porch, Daryl hands Merle over to Beth, who struggles to hold him up and keep a grip on the first aid kit and plastic bag at the same time.

“Well, howdy there, sweetheart.” Merle leans more of his weight into Beth, and she nearly stumbles. “Knew you’d come ’round eventually.”

Beth contemplates the merits of allowing Merle to die from blood poisoning. Like, she wouldn’t _actually._ But it’s a pretty cathartic fantasy.

Daryl shoots them a quelling look over his shoulder. “Y’all'd best shut the hell up.”

“I didn’t even _say_ anything.”

Daryl ignores her, taking a tentative step over the threshold while Beth cranes a frantic look over her shoulder. Are the monsters down the street moving faster, or is that the adrenaline warping her perception?

Daryl’s crossbow twangs, releasing a bolt, and Beth whips her head back around just as a monster that came fumbling around the hallway’s corner goes down with an awful, wet noise. Daryl waves Beth and Merle inside, and Beth squeezes an arm around Merle’s waist, dragging him forward with a grunt.

Merle cackles like a hyena, and Beth hisses at him to shut up. He doesn’t listen. “Damn, girl. You ain’t half as scrawny as I thought.” He gives her bicep an appreciative squeeze, and Beth would slap him if her hands weren’t full. “You got a license to carry them guns?”

Daryl sidles past them to shut and lock the front door before resuming his place at the head of their sad little caravan. Beth asks Merle, “You ever haul milk pails before?”  

“Nah.”

“Yeah, well, they’re heavier than they look.”

“So’re you, I’ll bet,” Merle says admiringly.

“Yeah,” Beth mutters. “So I’ve been told.”

“In here,” Daryl calls, and Beth edges past the fallen monster, not particularly caring if Merle gets his boots in rotten entrails but also not wanting him to slip and fall and expose his open wound to a diseased corpse.

Daryl’s found the small kitchen, and he gestures for Beth to help him lie Merle down on the tiled floor. They push Merle onto his knees, and then onto his stomach, and he goes down fairly easily, but not without a muttered litany of complaints.

“Man, shut the fuck up,” Daryl tells him. His sweaty bangs are plastered to his forehead, and his cheeks are so red that Beth’s half convinced _he’s_ the one with the fever. “You got your own damn self into this fuckin’ mess. I had it handled back there—”

Merle pushes up on one arm and twists his head around like he’s trying to get a look at his wound. “Boy, the only thing you been _handlin’_ lately is the lil’ miss over here.”

Beth makes a strangled noise of suppressed rage, but Daryl doesn’t rise to the bait like she expected him to. No, he narrows his eyes, pulls a buck knife out of his pocket, snaps it open—

And starts methodically cutting Merle’s jeans away from the site of the wound, careful not to dig the tip of the blade into the wound itself.

Merle’s not wearing any underwear. Beth could’ve gone the rest of her life not knowing this.

“Motherfucker, this’s the only pair I got!”

Beth averts her eyes. “It's just like Daryl said: you brought this upon yourself.”

“Oh, yeah?” Merle flips up his middle finger. “Well, here’s a straw so y’all can suck my ass.”

Yeah, he’s gonna be _fine_.

Daryl hisses, not at what Merle said, but at what he’s seeing, and Beth automatically looks at the wound—then has to look away and breathe unsteadily through her mouth. Once she’s fairly certain that she’s not gonna throw up on anybody, she meets Daryl’s eyes and asks, “You ever dig a bullet out of a wound before?”

She’s moderately surprised when he says, “Nah.” Then, with a trace of irony, he asks, “Have _you_?”

Merle snorts. Beth ignores him.

Because here it is. Here’s the thing that she’s been stewing over since she realized Merle had been shot. Here’s why she really, really wishes that they had access to a hospital.

“No.” Beth pulls a deep breath in through her nose and regrets it as soon as she smells the heavy iron tang of fresh blood. “But I know how to. In theory.”

“In theory,” Daryl echoes flatly, fingers stained with blood, the undershirt from earlier pressed to his brother’s oozing wound. Oozing, not gushing. There’s that, at least.

“Yeah, my—my dad’s a vet.”

Merle looks up at that, dazed eyes sharpening. “Your daddy’s a combat medic?”

Uh. “A veterinarian.”

Merle cackles unsteadily, head dropping against his clenched forearm. “A _veterinarian._ Jesus H. Christ.”

Now’s really not the time, but Beth can’t quite stem the rush of defensiveness. “Look, the point is, I’ve seen him perform this type of surgery before. An’ vet school’s real hard to get into, so it ain’t like he didn’t know what he was doin’.”

Daryl skims right on by all that and asks the relevant question. “Yeah, but d’ _you_?”

Not. Even. Remotely. “In theory,” Beth repeats through clenched teeth. She reaches for the first aid kit with trembling fingers and flips it open to scan the contents. Then she shrugs off her backpack, braces her palms on the floor, and pushes to her feet.

“The fuck’re you goin’?” Daryl barks.

“To the sink,” Beth snaps right back. “If I’m gonna go poking around an open wound, I gotta be sterile. An’ so do _you_ , supposin’ you intend to make yourself useful.”

At the sink, Beth pumps sticky blue dish soap into her hand and starts washing up. It’s not ideal, but she doesn’t have the time to go hunting for a bathroom and a bar of hand soap. And, hey. At least it’s antibacterial.

And as she scrubs her hands and arms raw beneath the cold blast of water, she bows her head and tries to summon the Maggie Voice.

It doesn’t come.

Alright. Okay. Guess she’s on her own this time.

On her own. What does she have that’s hers? What does she know? She knows that, when she was fourteen, a man in an orange vest carried a wounded dog onto her family’s property. A mutt, a stray. The hunter’s bullet had missed the buck and hit the dog, lodging and shattering in its flank.

Maggie and Beth were the only ones who were home that day, so Maggie and Beth were the ones who assisted their father.

The dog had lived. Beth holds onto this. The dog had lived.

“Hey! The fuck’s takin’ you so long?”

Beth rounds on Daryl, water dripping from her hands, the sink still running at full blast behind her. Daryl’s kneeling at his brother’s side—Merle appears to have passed out again—and he’s glaring at Beth like _she’s_ the one who shot his brother in the ass.

He’s stressed. He’s panicking. He’s rightfully terrified that his brother’s going to die of infection or blood loss and his only hope of neither of those things happening is a young girl who’s only witnessed this procedure (on a dog) and never actually performed it herself.

Beth gets where he’s coming from. But she’s not gonna let him yell at her, either. She wasn’t just talking out of her ass when she said that she wasn’t gonna let him treat her like crap.

“I told you, I was washing my hands so I don’t up an’ give Merle an infection—if he doesn’t have one already. Now, if I’m gonna do this, I gotta stay calm, and I can’t stay calm if you keep _yellin’ at me_.”

Daryl rears back, mouth twisting, but he doesn’t retort. Good.

There’s a tea towel folded on the countertop next to the sink; Beth grabs it and pats her hands dry, then crosses the kitchen to kneel across from Daryl and take over staunching Merle’s wound. Their fingers brush, and Daryl jerks away from the point of contact. Whatever.

“Go wash your hands,” Beth tells him, voice a little gentler than it was a minute ago. “They’re filthy.”

Daryl scoffs, but he does as he’s told, and Beth sorts onehanded through the first aid kit while keeping her other hand pressed to the wadded-up undershirt.

“Hey,” says Merle, (barely) cognizant for the moment, “if ya wanted to feel me up, sweetheart, all ya had to do was ask.”

Beth presses down harder on his wound, and Merle subsides with a hiss.

The sink shuts off, and Daryl resumes his spot across from Beth. Beth hasn’t heard any suspicious groans or hisses in the last few minutes (none that didn’t come from Merle, anyway), but she still asks, “What if somethin’ tries to attack us while I’m workin’?” After all, there’s a whole second floor of this house that Daryl failed to check in his rush to save his brother.

Daryl jerks his head at the crossbow, propped on the floor at his side. “I got it covered. Don’t worry about it. Jus’ get that bullet outta my brother.” And he presses his hands to the bundled undershirt, freeing up both of Beth’s.

Beth stands up, shooting Daryl a quelling look when he glares at her. She grabs the damp tea towel and crosses to the fridge with its built-in freezer. The power’s out, near as she can tell, and the cubes in the ice tray could’ve melted—but they haven’t. Guess the freezer door hasn’t been opened since the power went out, trapping the cold and keeping the ice intact. Beth scoops out a handful of ice cubes, hissing at the bite of burning cold, and dumps them into the tea towel, folding it over to create a makeshift icepack. She returns to Merle’s side and tells Daryl to pull back the undershirt.

She presses the icepack to Merle’s wound, and when he yelps and swears at her, she says, “We don’t have anything else to numb it with, so shut up and deal.”

“Alright, alright. Jesus. No need ta get bitchy.”

Beth swallows a furious retort and asks Daryl to hold the icepack in place while she sorts through the first aid kit, lying everything she’ll need out on the tile. Tweezers, sterilized sutures and needle. No antiseptic, unfortunately, because Beth used the last of it on Georgia—for all the good it did either of them.

Beth chews on her lower lip. “I know this’s a long shot, but d’you have any antibiotics on you?”  

Daryl nods at the plastic bag, the bag Beth forgot about. She rattles through it, eyes widening as she scans the labels. She doesn’t understand all of it, but she knows some things from her father’s practice. There are antibiotics. There are also narcotics. A _lot_ of narcotics.

Daryl says, “Merle gets the clap on occasion,” and Merle, loopy from pain and blood loss, hoots like that’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.

Beth refrains from commenting, just grabs a bottle of codeine and shoves it at Merle, saying, “Here, take a couple’a these.”

Merle pops the lid off with this thumb and dry swallows what looks like several pills more than a _couple_ , but Beth’s a teenager without a certification in _anything_ getting ready to perform field surgery, so what can she even say that wouldn’t make her sound like a hypocrite?

She peels the now-bloodstained icepack away from Merle’s wound, knowing that it’s as numb as it’s gonna get and trusting that the narcotics will kick in soon enough. Poking around with gentle fingers, she says, “Looks like it didn’t shatter, at least. That’s good.”

“Yeah,” Merle drawls. “I’m feelin’ real damn lucky right about now.”

“Shut the hell up,” Beth and Daryl snap in unison, and Merle falls silent with a grumble.

“You got a lighter?” Beth asks Daryl, and he produces one from his pocket before she can even finish her sentence. She flicks the wheel, coaxing out a flame, and holds the fire up to the tweezers. She doesn’t know how long it takes to sterilize something, and she doesn’t have the time to waffle over it. She’ll just have to depend on the antibiotics to compensate for her errors.

She snaps the lighter shut and sets it aside, tweezers poised between her fingers. She shuts her eyes. Shudders out a breath and gives the Maggie Voice one last chance to make itself known.  

“Hey.”

Beth opens her eyes. Daryl’s looking at her, his own eyes fierce and burning. He’s not yelling at her, but going by the vein throbbing in his forehead, it’s costing him dearly to hold himself back.

“You got this.” It’s not exactly a reassurance. More like a reminder that she _has to_ have this, because she’s all they’ve got. 

Beth nods. She’s got this.

She lowers the tweezers to Merle’s wound and sets to digging out the bullet. Merle howls and bites into his forearm, and Daryl unbuckles his belt in a hurry, sliding it free of his jeans’ loops and pressing the leather between Merle’s gnashing teeth. Flushed from head to toe and sweating bullets, Beth keeps digging even though every part of her wants to stop, the tips of the tweezers slipping through rivulets of blood, unable to find purchase. She can’t do this. She _can’t_.

But she doesn’t have a choice.

It takes an eternity, but Beth eventually pulls the bullet out, red and wet with blood, and drops it onto the floor with a clatter. Merle appears to have passed out again, which is probably a mercy.

Beth stretches her aching fingers, then gets up to wash her hands again before returning to rip open the plastic pack of sutures. Tongue sandwiched between her teeth, she botches it several times before she can get the thread looped through the eye of the needle.

This oughta be the easy part. She’s never stitched a person up before, but she knows how to repair torn clothes. Same basic concept, right?

Probably not.

“Hold the edges of the wound together,” she tells Daryl.

Daryl complies, and Beth takes a deep breath in through her mouth before pushing the needle through the flap of Merle’s torn flesh and making the first stitch.  

It doesn’t feel anything like stitching a shirt. Acid pushes up Beth’s throat, and she swallows it, swallows back the sour burn. She keeps stitching. Clumsy stitches. Merle’s gonna scar for sure, but Beth doubt he’ll care. He probably wears his scars with pride, like trophies, proof that he survived. _Ain’t nothin’ can kill Merle Dixon, motherfuckers._

It takes longer than stitching a shirt, too, but it does end, even though it feels endless. Beth snips the thread with the tiny pair of scissors that came in the kit; wipes up the excess blood before taping a bandage over the stitches; and slumps back on her haunches, sweating and shaking. How many days until the stitches come out? Ten to fourteen, she’s pretty sure. Or was it seven? No, no. That’s for head wounds.

Daryl digs through the plastic bag of pharmaceuticals and feeds Merle some antibiotics, massaging his brother’s throat when he fails to swallow them right away. Beth leaves him to it, stumbling to her feet and moving towards the sink in a daze.

She wraps her fingers around the faucet but doesn’t twist it on. There’s a tap on her shoulder, and Beth whirls with a startled yip, leaving a smear of blood behind on the chrome.

Daryl’s standing close, hands held up in surrender. When Beth doesn’t make any move to attack him or push him away, he lowers those hands and fists them at his sides. One thumb skates across the corresponding index finger. Up, down.  

“Hey. I’m gonna move Merle into the living room. Let him sleep it off on the couch.”

“Good idea,” says Beth. “You’ll wanna lie him down on his stomach, though.”

“Yeah.” Daryl snorts. “Guess he’ll hafta get used to that.”

Beth tries to smile. Fails.

Daryl scuffs one foot across the tile. “Hey, I’m. M’sorry for bein’ a dick.”

Beth wants to tell him that he’s always kind of a dick, so if all those other times he was rude to her didn’t warrant apology, why should this one?

She doesn’t say that, though. What she says is, “He’s your brother.”

Daryl nods unevenly, and Beth goes to sidle past him, forgetting her bloody hands and the need to wash them, but then _Daryl’s_ hand snaps out and closes around her wrist. And it’s not the tightness of the grip that compels Beth to stop, but the fact that he reached out at all.

Beth stares at that hand: wide palm, scarred fingers, covered in less blood than hers but still pretty gory. The fingers twitch. He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t seem to know _what_ to say.

Eventually, he settles on, “Thanks.” He doesn’t let go of her.

“He’s your brother,” Beth repeats. She twists her wrist, but not to get away. She threads her fingers through Daryl’s and squeezes.

His eyelids flutter, lashes dancing against his cheekbones. Beth cups her free hand around his neck, tracking rusty stains. He doesn’t seem to mind.

She inches closer, as cautiously as she would when approaching a starved, feral cat. She rests her forehead against his sternum. Sweat and iron plug up her nostrils and aggravate her headache, but she doesn’t pull away. She doesn’t pull away, and Daryl lets her lean on him.

And she’s probably imagining it, but she could swear that he grazes his fingers against her hip.

 

* * *

 

Beth used to sing in the shower all the time. In the shower, in the car, while she was doing her chores. Under her breath or at the top of her lungs, Beth used to sing every day. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Hell, there were days when she sang more than she spoke.  

She hasn’t sung since before the dead started walking. Until now, anyway.

Standing beneath a rumbling shower spray in a stranger’s abandoned house at the end of the world, Beth rinses the last of the shampoo out of her hair and wraps her arms around her middle, swaying in place. Her legs and underarms are getting bristly, but she couldn’t find any razors that weren’t already half used, and she’s gotta draw the line somewhere. Bad enough she’s using their shampoo and soap, whoever they are.

Or were.

Lost in thoughts of the dead, Beth feels her mouth moving before she hears the words.

_Ruby lips above the water, blowing bubbles soft and fine.  
But alas, I was no swimmer, so I lost my Clementine._

_Oh my darling, oh my darling. Oh my darling, Clementine,  
You were lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine._

Beth can’t remember the first time she heard it—it just feels like one of those songs she was born knowing, it’s so ubiquitous, like it’s written into her genetic code—but she knows that her mother likes it, and she remembers being shocked by how morbid it was once she was old enough to understand the lyrics.  

It's a short song, and Beth reaches the end of it not long after realizing she was singing it at all. She stands there in silence for another couple of minutes, shivering as the water cools, then finally snaps off the valve with a decisive twist of her wrist.

She pats herself dry and dresses slowly, pulling her socks over her damp feet with difficulty and tugging on her flannel button-up to ward off the chill brought on by her still-wet hair. She glances in the mirror and sees what she expected to see in the Walmart dressing room: bags beneath her eyes, acne on her cheeks, lips gone pale and chapped. She doesn’t look all that different from the dead that walk, actually.

At least she’s cleaner than she was before.

She couldn’t find a hairbrush. She fingercombs her hair and leaves it loose to dry.

Daryl’s slumped on the floor in the hallway, back propped against the wall opposite the bathroom. He’s got one leg drawn up, arm slung across it, fingers working restlessly. He always seems to do that when he’s sitting or standing still, like he can’t bear not to be in some kind of motion.

He hasn’t washed the blood off. It stains his wrists, his hands, the side of his neck where Beth touched him earlier.

Beth stands in the bathroom doorway, water dripping down her back, and blurts, “Uh. You didn’t hear me singin’, did you?”

Daryl shrugs. He’s not looking at her straight on, but his eyes keep flicking back to her like he can’t help it. “Heard a little.”   

“Oh. Sorry.” And why the hell is she apologizing?  

Another shrug. “Didn’t bother me.”

Her humming seemed to bother him plenty back in his truck, but Beth doesn’t remind him of that. She crosses the hallway and settles onto the floor next to him, legs stretched out in front of her, hands linked in her lap.

“It’s real morbid, ain’t it? The—the song. No one ever thinks it is, at first, until they notice the lyrics. I mean, it’s a song about drowning, and we teach it to little kids. Pretty messed up, huh?” She’s babbling.

Daryl picks at a hangnail. “Never really paid attention to the words before.”

So much for making conversation. Beth lapses into silence for a few minutes, then takes a breath and asks the obvious question. “Now what?”

Daryl taps his fingers against his leg. “Wait for Merle to heal up enough to walk alright on his own, I guess.”

“And after that?”

“Fuck, girl, I dunno. Keep runnin’, I guess. Try an’ find someplace where this shit ain’t spread yet.”

“You think there’re places it _hasn’t_ spread?” He can’t actually believe that. He saw the news, same as her.  

Daryl scowls at her. “You got any better ideas?”

Yeah, she does. Find another way back home. Loop back the way they came in hopes that the herd on the highway has passed, and that another hasn’t shuffled in to replace it.

Lie down and wait to die like she wanted to in the woods.

“Nah,” she whispers.

She’s got something else on her mind, anyway. Something she should’ve told him from the start. Could be that Merle was right and that Daryl’ll kick her to the curb afterwards, but the thing is. The thing is, Daryl came back for her today. A man like that can’t be keeping her around just to use her.

So, like ripping off a bandaid, Beth screws her eyes shut and says, “I’m sixteen.”

She’s expecting a lot of things. For him to jump to his feet and start yelling at her. For him to tell her to get the fuck out.

She _isn’t_ expecting him to say, “Yeah. I know.”

Beth’s eyes fly open. Daryl’s facing forward, not looking at her. His jaw’s clenched tight, and his fingers are curled against his palms like claws, but he’s not yelling at her.

“You _know_?” Beth asks, reduced to parroting him in her shock.

The crown of Daryl’s skull thunks against the whitewashed wall. “Heard me the first time, didn’t ya? Said I know. Seen your friends’ IDs, did the fuckin’ math.”

What, did _everyone_ root through Georgia and Gordon’s stuff? Or did Merle just leave their wallets lying around after _he_ was done looking through them? “You’re not…mad?”

“Don’t really got the right to be, do I? I’m the one who should’a known better.” But then he grinds his thumb and forefinger against his eyeballs and releases a hard breath that sounds a little like a growl. “Fuck. I dunno. Guess I am. I’m more pissed at me than you, though.”

Beth does some math herself. “Was it. Did you see their IDs before we—before that second time?”  

The ear that Beth can see is flushed so red it’s practically glowing. Not just the tip; the whole thing. “Nah. Saw ’em the mornin’ after.”  

“Oh.”

Daryl thumps his head against the wall again. “Think part of me already knew. Did it anyway. I dunno why. Ain’t the kinda guy who goes out of my way to fuck teenagers or nothin’. Dunno why I did it this time.”

_Say it’s because you wanted me. Say it’s because you wanted me so bad that you didn’t care about right and wrong._

He doesn’t say that. Of course he doesn’t.   

Beth scratches her nails against her stiff new jeans. There’s a rusty stain on the left thigh now, about the size of a penny. Dried blood. “Merle said. Merle said you’d dump me if you knew my real age. Said you’d get rid of me if you couldn’t f—if you couldn’t have sex with me anymore.”

 _Now_ Daryl reacts the way she expected him to, twisting to glare at her and snap, “Fuck, Beth. I look like the kinda guy who’d feed a girl to the wolves jus’ ’cause I couldn’t fuck her no more?”

“I don’t know,” Beth says frankly. “I don’t know anything about you, Daryl.” Not quite true, but true enough for the purposes of this conversation.

Daryl falls back against the wall with a thud. “Fuck. Well, I ain’t. An’ Merle fuckin’ _knows_ I ain’t.”

“Then why’d he tell me that you are?”

“Christ, I dunno. ’Cause he’s an asshole.”

A fair assessment. Beth draws up her legs and loops her arms around her knees. “So where’s that leave us?”

Daryl doesn’t answer right away, like he’s thinking it over. Or maybe like doesn’t want to have this conversation and is putting off the inevitable. “Same as before, I guess. You’re a pain in my ass, girl, but I ain’t gonna dump you on the side of the road or nothin’.”

“Alright.” Beth swallows tightly. “Thanks.”

“But, listen. We ain’t doin’ that shit no more, alright?” Daryl gestures back and forth between himself and Beth. If he were Merle, he’d probably make the jackoff motion to illustrate precisely what he means by _that shit_. “First two times were mistakes. Ain’t goin’ for a third.”

Beth feels sick, and it’s not so much about wanting to have sex as it is _not_ wanting to lose the one form of human intimacy she has left.

“ _That shit_ , huh?” She tries to sound acerbic, like she doesn’t give a fuck, but her voice warbles a little anyway. “If you can’t say it, you probably shouldn’t be doin’ it.”

“Don’t fuckin’ matter,” Daryl snaps, “’cause we ain’t _gonna_ be doin’ it.” Beth looks away.  

She kind of expects him to push off from the floor and go check on Merle or something, anything to get away from her, but instead he says, “I don’t get it, girl. Merle’s been a shit to you from the word ‘go,’ an’ you helped him anyway.”

To this, at least, Beth has an easy answer. “It would’ve been wrong not to.”

Daryl just stares at her, eyebrows slowly pulling together until he’s scowling. Not scowling like he’s angry, though. More like he’s confused. Like he doesn’t get her and doesn’t necessarily want to.

Finally, he pushes to his feet and crosses the narrow hallway to the bathroom.

“Daryl.”

He stops, bloodstained hand clenched around the doorknob.

 _Thank you. Thank you for looking out for me. Thank you for not being like your brother. Thanks for not letting me die a virgin, because I_ am _gonna die, and probably sooner than you think._

Beth clears her throat. “There’s a clean towel on the rack.”

He jerks his head up and down, then steps into the bathroom and shuts the door behind him.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This isn't a world for singing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I fell for you like a child. Oh, but the fire went wild](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WaV2x8GXj0).

Beth figured that the people who lived here left in a hurry—after all, the front door was hanging wide open—and her theory’s confirmed when she wanders into one of the upstairs bedrooms and sees the state it’s in.

It’s a west-facing room, so the buttery, late-afternoon sunlight that pours in through the wide windows fills up all four corners and casts a natural spotlight on the chaos. Beth’s momma would say that it looks like a tornado rolled through here, and her daddy would call it a disaster area. Neither of them would be wrong.

Five of the nine dresser drawers have been yanked out of their cubbies and strewn across the floor; the remaining four hang precariously from their slots, waiting for a slammed door or strong gust of wind to send them crashing down to join their fellows. An unzipped, half-packed duffel bag slumps beside the dresser, clearly forgotten in the rush to get out of here.

Beth walks farther into the room, picking out the pale, rectangular patches on the wallpaper where framed photographs or paintings once hung. Not all of the shapes are rectangular, though. The one over the bed’s plywood headboard is in the shape of a cross. It’s big. Might’ve been a crucifix.

She picks her way through the maze of abandoned drawers and comes up to the dresser, sliding her fingers across its smooth surface. No dust. Whoever lived here left recently, maybe within the last day or two.

Her fingertips bump a small jewelry box, and she retracts her hand, feeling like she just accidentally brushed up against an exhibit in a museum. Like she just violated something old and precious.

The jewelry box is open, lid flipped back like its owner went scrambling through it at the last minute and couldn’t be bothered to put it to rights. Which doesn’t make much sense to Beth. Why didn’t they just take the whole thing with them? Too heavy? Not enough space left in their bags? But that doesn’t make any sense, either; not with the spare duffel bag sitting right there.

Of course, panic makes people stupid. Case in point: beaning a monster with your purse and then _losing_ said purse instead of grabbing a goddamn _gun_.

 _Anyway_.

The jewelry box looks empty at first glance, but upon closer inspection, it isn’t. There’s a claddagh ring, just like the one Hershel gave Annette on their tenth anniversary. Beside it lies a necklace with one precious opal hanging like a teardrop from its silver chain. And in the far-left corner, gleaming dully against the faded burgundy velvet that lines the box, is a saint’s medal.

Beth tells herself not to touch, that it’s one thing to take shelter in an abandoned home because she has to and quite another to go poking through anything that she doesn’t absolutely require to live. But she’s already pulling the length of tangled chain out of the abandoned jewelry box, the cool disc coming to rest face-up against the underside of her wrist.

The medal, which is roughly the size and shape of the pad of her thumb, depicts a triumphant angel trampling a horned devil into the dirt. Etched into the circumference of the disc are the words _Saint Michael Pray for Us_.

Baptists don’t have much use for saints, but Beth recognizes Michael the Archangel. She’s seen medals like this one looped around the necks of police officers and military personnel, but she’s pretty sure she read somewhere that Michael’s patronage also covers the sick and suffering. 

And since _all_ _of humanity_ is either sick or suffering right about now, Beth figures he’s been granted a field promotion to the patron saint of _everybody_.

The necklace has warmed in her grip, the cool metal having leeched the heat from her skin, and when she makes to return it to the jewelry box, she finds that she can’t let it go. Maybe she’s fooling herself into thinking that Someone wanted her to find this and keep it, and maybe she’s just a thief looting a tomb, but the part of her that’s her father’s daughter can’t help but think that she was meant to have this.

So she untangles the chain and loops it around her neck, and the medal comes to rest in the hollow between her breasts. And it’s not like she was expecting Michael himself to materialize from a split in the wispy clouds and tell her that everything’s gonna be okay, but she can’t help but slump with disappointment when she doesn’t get that warm, soft feeling that usually accompanies prayer. A feeling like she’s being heard. A feeling like she’s loved.   

She doesn’t take the necklace off, though. She tucks the medal beneath the collar of her t-shirt and makes her way over to the bed. She kneels and props her forearms on the mattress, clasping her hands and pressing her forehead to the plum duvet. Her lips move, but no sound comes out. She’s always preferred to pray in the privacy of her own mind, where no one but God and Jesus can hear her.

_Our Father in heaven,_

_hallowed be your name,_

_your kingdom come,_

_your will be done,_

_on earth as in heaven._

_Give us today our daily bread._

_Forgive us our sins_

_as we forgive those who sin against us._

_Save us from the time of trial_

_and deliver us from evil._

_For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours_

_now and forever. Amen._

It doesn’t make her feel any better.

 

* * *

 

Daryl dragged the dead monster outside once he was finished getting Merle settled in the living room, but there’s a stain on the hardwood floor that would probably refuse to come out even if Beth drenched it with bleach. She gives it a wide berth on her way to the living room, nose wrinkling at the lingering stench. Just when she thinks she’s getting used to the smell of rot that covers everything, something goes and proves her wrong.

Merle’s snoring like a chainsaw on the long tartan couch, right arm folded beneath his cheek, left arm dangling over the side so the blunt tips of his fingers brush the carpet. Beth stoops to check his bandages, ascertaining that they don’t need to be changed and that he isn’t bleeding too heavily. They don’t, and he isn’t.

Then she straightens up and kicks the base of the couch so hard Merle nearly goes sprawling onto the floor.

“Whattha _fuck_!” Merle scrambles for purchase like a cat dangling from a tree branch, looking frantically around with gummy, bloodshot eyes. Those eyes narrow when they land on Beth, pinpointing her as the source of his disturbed nap. “The fuck was that for?”

Beth crosses her arms. “I need to talk to you.”

Merle scrubs at his mouth, collecting drool. “Fuckin’ hell, girl, couldn’t it wait?”

“No, it couldn’t.” Not with the way things are nowadays. Can’t risk put anything off when you might be dead tomorrow. If nothing else, the apocalypse is an effective cure for procrastination.

Merle makes like he’s gonna roll over and lever himself to his feet, only to remember at the last second that his ass has a hole in it. He slumps back down onto his stomach and fixes Beth with a surly look.

“G’on, then. Spit it out so’s I can get back to my beauty sleep.” He laughs at his own joke, but Beth is not amused.

She takes a deep breath. She wouldn’t have the nerve to say any of this if Daryl were here, but he’s _not_ here. He’s in the backyard hunting squirrels for dinner—and isn’t _that_ a visual Beth could do without.

But anyway.

Resisting the urge to grip her saint’s medal, Beth says, “I wanna know why you lied.”

Merle’s eyes flash with clarity, but then he props his chin on his fist and drawls, “Told a few lies in my time, lil’ miss. Ya gotta be more specific.” 

Oh, he knows _exactly_ what she’s talking about. “I wanna know why you told me that Daryl’d kick me to the curb if he couldn’t—if he couldn’t keep havin’ sex with me when you damn well _knew_ he wouldn’t do that.”

To his credit, Merle immediately stops trying to obfuscate. “You an’ Darlena had y’all’selves a lil’ come-to-Jesus chat while I was out, huh?”

“Think it’s pretty obvious we did, or else I wouldn’t be here. Now tell me why you lied.”

Merle shrugs. “Don’t gotta tell ya shit, princess. Maybe I was jus’ fuckin’ with ya, ya ever think’a that?”

Yeah, she has. Daryl seemed to think that was what Merle was doing, and maybe Beth would think so, too, if she bought Merle’s dumb hick act. Merle’s not stupid, and Beth doubts ever he does anything without a reason, no matter how senseless that reason may seem to anyone else but him. Even his catcalling and rude nicknames have their purposes; he uses them to exert power over people, to gain and keep the upper hand.

So, no. Beth doesn’t believe that he was _just fucking with her_. Not for a second.

She also knows that he’s every bit as stubborn as his brother, which means that she’s not gonna get anything out of him that he doesn’t want to tell her.

Not without offering him an incentive, anyway.

Beth scopes out the living room: dead television set, more pale rectangles on the walls where photos used to hang, Merle’s couch, a plush recliner. The recliner is home to the plastic bag of drugs, and before Beth can even complete her own thought, she’s snatching up the bag and holding it high over her head like a schoolyard bully with a wad of someone else’s lunch money. She’s not used to having a height advantage over anyone but small children, but Merle is grounded. There’s no way he’s getting off that couch unless he crawls, in which case Beth can simply outrun him at a leisurely walk.

“ _Hey_ ,” Merle barks, veins standing out like garter snakes in his neck and forehead, but Beth’s already talking over him.

“Either you tell me what you were thinkin’ when you lied to me about Daryl, or I’m tossin’ your drugs out on the street with the monsters, and good luck hobblin’ after ’em.” She pauses, then pastes a sweet smile onto her face, all genteel southern belle. “You can keep the antibiotics, though. Wouldn’t want you comin’ down with an infection after all, now, would we, Mr. Dixon?”

Merle’s eyes thin with what Beth reads as a cross between low-level hate and grudging respect. “You’re cold as ice, lil’ miss, anybody ever tell you that? Guess I should’a ’spected as much from the bitch who held a knife to my fuckin’ throat.”

Beth doesn’t dignify any of that with a response. Just says, “You gonna make me count?”

“Jesus Christ, _fine_. Jus’ put the fuckin’ bag down, a’right?”

Beth lowers her arm but pointedly _doesn’t_ put the bag down. “Nah, I don’t think I will. Not till you’ve finished tellin’ me what I wanna hear.”

Merle makes a noise that Beth would interpret as a laugh if his eyes weren’t so cold. “Trust me, sweetheart, you don’t _wanna_ hear this shit. But you asked, so you’re gonna hear it anyways.”

Beth crosses her arms and gives Merle her best _try me_ face.

He jabs his pointer finger at her. “Toldja before that my lil’ brother’s the sweet one, didn’t I? Wasn’t jus’ blowin’ smoke out my ass, girl. Boy’s too fuckin’ soft for his own good; always has been. Shit was dangerous enough before, but this brave new world we’re livin’ in? It don’t got no room for _soft._ S’one thing for him to fuck ya and watch out for ya, but he can’t go gettin’ _attached_. Dumbass’s gonna up an’ do somethin’ stupid as hell like fall in love with ya, I can feel it, an’ then he’s gonna get hisself killed on your goddamn account. And I ain’t gonna stand for that shit, so I did what I had to do.”

Beth’s ears are buzzing, and her stomach’s somewhere in the region of her feet. She can’t believe what she’s hearing. She can’t even process what Merle said about Daryl falling in love with her. Not right now.

Merle was trying to drive a wedge between her and Daryl. He was trying to make Beth mistrust and withdraw from Daryl before he could go and get _attached_.

Beth fists her shaking hands. “You’re full of shit.”

Merle’s eyebrows arch, and he rasps a disbelieving laugh. “That right?”

“Yeah, that’s right. You said did this for your brother, but what is and isn’t good for Daryl is up to _Daryl_. You’re just—you’re just tryin’ to _control_ him ’cause you can’t stand the thought of him thinkin’ for himself or carin’ about anyone and anything that isn’t _you_.”  

The look Merle gives her right then would be terrifying if he wasn’t convalescent. Even so, it still sends a chill to the very root of Beth’s being.  

But then his face cracks open on a toothy smile, and he says, “ _Shit,_ girl. The fuck’re you s’posed t’be, Dr. fuckin’ Phil?”

Beth purses her lips. If he wants to deflect, fine. She didn’t come here to psychoanalyze him; she came to get the truth. And she got it. And he was right: she didn’t like it, not a word of it.

She tosses the plastic bag onto the floor—out of Merle’s reach, just to be spiteful, and Daryl will come back in and pick it up anyway—before heading out of the room at a furious clip, the saint’s medal swinging like a pendulum between her breasts.

She doesn’t know where she’s going or what she’s gonna do. She just knows that she needs to get the hell _away_ from Merle Dixon before she does something that she and Daryl will both regret. 

 

* * *

 

The power’s out but the gas line’s still working, which means that Beth gets to eat squirrel stew for dinner. Daryl hunted squirrels and rabbits back at the cabin, too, except Beth was able to pass on eating those because the cabinets were so well stocked. They’ve still got some nonperishables in their bags, but this house’s kitchen cabinets are empty of anything edible, and they need to ration what they’ve got. The squirrel meat’s so gamey that she feels like she’s chewing on greasy rubber, but it’s been ages since she’s had real protein in her stomach, and she feels better, if a little queasy, for having eaten.

She discovered a horde of Yankee Candles sequestered in a kitchen cabinet and lit five of them, and now they’re scattered around the living room, painting the sealed curtains orange and filling her head with the clashing scents of spiced pumpkin and root beer. She’s curled up in the recliner—which she pointedly dragged farther away from the couch—and is in the middle of nodding off into a restless food coma when Merle barks a laugh that jolts her back to full consciousness.

“What’s so fuckin’ funny?” Daryl grumbles. He’s standing in the open archway to the living room, and the candlelight does something strange to his bone structure, makes him look almost feline.

He’s holding an acoustic guitar by the neck.

“‘What’s so fuckin’ funny,’ he says.” Merle points at the guitar. “Boy, the hell you think you’re doin’ with that thing?”

Daryl hunches his shoulders, all pissy defensiveness. “Shit, I dunno, thought I’d eat it for dessert.”

Beth thinks she might know what he’s doing with it. She thinks she knows, and the knowledge makes her chest go weirdly tight like she’s been running too fast and too far.

Merle follows Daryl’s gaze over to Beth. “You play the guitar, lil’ missy?”

Beth starts picking at her cuticles, unable to look at either Dixon brother head-on. “I mean—sorta? Otis—he’s one’a my dad’s farmhands—he’s great on the guitar, but I’ve always been better on the piano.”  

Merle hoots, and Beth flushes in anticipation of whatever nasty thing he’s going to say. “You hear that, Daryl? She’s _better on the piano_.”

_Yup. Saw that one coming._

“Shut your goddamn mouth.” Daryl hefts the guitar like he’s thinking about beating Merle’s head in with it—but then he shoves it in Beth’s direction and says, “You want the damn thing or not?”

“I…guess?” But that must be enough for Daryl, because he stomps over to Beth and shoves the guitar into her lap before retreating to a corner and sliding down the wall until he’s crouched on the floor.   

Beth shifts the guitar’s weight and absently starts tuning it. Into the relative silence, Merle says, “How ’bout you play us somethin’, lil’ miss?”  

Beth doesn’t know if that’s a peace offering or if he’s just bored. _Beth’s_ bored, which is why, instead of telling him to go to hell, she says, “What d’y’all wanna hear?”

Daryl just shrugs, but Merle says, “Christ, I dunno. Whatever ya want, I guess—s’long as it ain’t no fuckin’ Taylor Swift.”

Just for that, Beth _oughta_ start singing Taylor Swift—but then her eyes fix on the candle she set on the coffee table, on the guttering wax and the wavering flame, and lyrics to one of her dad’s favorite Johnny Cash songs start drifting through her head. Before she knows it, those lyrics are manifesting on her tongue, and although her fingers are thick and clumsy on the guitar strings, her voice is strong and sure.

She’s a little embarrassed at first, the way she always is when she sings in front of new people, but after a while, she forgets there’s anyone listening but her, losing herself in words that describe a love so fierce it burns like a wildfire.

But she’s snapped out of her trance when the song winds down to a close, jerked back to ugly reality by Merle’s sharp whistle.

“Well, hell! We got ourselves a regular Dolly Parton on our hands, lil’ brother! ’Cept, y'know. Without them huge—”

Daryl hisses and tosses a ceramic knick knack at Merle, who regrettably ducks just in time to avoid getting brained. The little figurine sails over his head and lands unbroken on the carpet with a soft thud. 

Beth sets the guitar down by the recliner, cheeks burning like the fire in the song. The peaceful feeling she gets when she sings dissipates as reality reasserts itself. This isn’t a world for singing.

“Naw, but that was real nice, lil’ miss. Got a pretty set’a pipes on ya—don’t she, Daryl?”

Beth’s eyes trail to Daryl, who’s chewing on his thumbnail. It’s hard to tell in this light, but his cheeks look like they might be a little pink.

“S’alright, I guess,” Daryl eventually pronounces, words coming out slurred around his thumb. Beth frowns.

“If you hated it that much, just say so,” she huffs, and Daryl twitches irritably. 

“Didn’t hate it. Said it was alright, didn’t I?”

“Ain’t exactly a ringin’ endorsement.”

“The hell you want, a write-up in _Rolling_ fuckin’ _Stone_?”

“Well, it’d be a good start,” Beth says, a note of teasing sliding into her voice, a smirk tilting her lips, and Daryl just. Stares at her.

Beth doesn’t know what she’s seeing in Daryl’s eyes, but it looks a little bit like how she felt when he came back for her in the woods. Her scalp prickles like it did when they first locked eyes at the gas station, and, painfully aware of Merle’s presence in the room, she drops her gaze to her lap and picks up the guitar again for something to do with her hands.

_Dumbass’s gonna up an’ do somethin’ stupid as hell like fall in love with ya, I can feel it._

Beth doesn’t believe that, not for a second. That was just Merle trying to justify his possessiveness, his entitlement to his brother’s autonomy. There’s no way that Daryl would ever—

There’s just no way. Sex is one thing. But _love_?

Merle’s so full of shit it’s coming out his eyeballs. That’s all there is to this.

Beth repeats the denial like a mantra, but she can feel Daryl’s eyes on her like fingertips. She thinks of how he found this guitar and thought of her, and her pulse throbs painfully in her ears.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daryl’s a good person, and if not entirely good, then at least _decent_. A decent man wouldn’t be left completely unmoved by the helplessness of a stranger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Everyone I know goes away in the end](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSS2IgnnBo8).

**(day 12)**

Beth was raised up right by God-fearing Baptists, but their church was about the furthest thing from a doomsday cult, and it’s like she said before: she never took Revelations very literally. If she had, though—if she’d spared much thought at all for the end of the world—she never would’ve expected it to be this _boring_.

Merle can’t go far with that healing bullet hole in his ass, and if Merle’s not going anywhere, _Daryl’s_ not going anywhere, or at least no farther than it takes him to hunt squirrels and rabbits for dinner. And since Beth’s not about to strike out on her own with nothing but a knife and her wits, that means she’s stuck here until such a time as Merle’s able to walk more than ten feet unassisted.

So, yeah, mostly it’s boring. But it turns out that boredom and terror aren’t mutually exclusive.

Because it’s goddamn _terrifying_ when a monster stumbles onto the front porch and just _hurls_ itself at the door, dirty fingernails scrabbling for purchase, drawn to the yellow house by noise or movement or the smell of living things. Beth’s in no state to pinpoint the cause, anyway, crouching behind an armchair in the living room with her hands over her ears, eyes screwed shut, murmuring the Lord’s Prayer over and over under her breath to drown out the sound of the rattling door while Daryl loops around from the backyard and puts a bolt through the thing’s skull.

That afternoon, he and Beth string up a sort of hodgepodge alarm system made out of rope from the back of the Ford and pots and pans from the kitchen. A person could just step right over it, but the monsters are stupid, unthinking. If one approaches the porch, it’ll trip the alarm, and they’ll know it’s there before it can kick up enough of a fuss to attract more of the things. 

Daryl accepted Beth’s help with the alarm only grudgingly, and his company was hardly pleasant, but the fact is that she’ll take just about any distraction, providing it doesn’t come paired with snapping teeth and dirty fingernails. Few present themselves, and when she’s not gazing listlessly at the outlines of missing portraits on the walls, she’s messing around with the guitar. _Her_ guitar now, she supposes, at least for as long as they’re here. She spends the better part of two days teaching herself how to play the Bo Diddley beat, something she’s been meaning to do for a while but just never found the time for.

And now—well. Now, all she’s _got_ is time.

She keeps at it, anyway, and her fingers are just getting used to the shapes they have to make to form the notes when Daryl drags her away from the guitar with the intention of teaching her how to field strip a gun.

Beth wouldn’t let Otis teach her how to shoot, but he got as far as showing her how to field strip her weapon before she begged off learning something she didn’t have any use for. It’s been long enough since then that she can’t remember much of what he taught her, but even if she could, Otis used a shotgun. This is a handgun— _Merle’s_ handgun; a Browning Hi-Power, according to Daryl—and Beth wouldn’t know how to start taking it apart even if she wanted to.

And she _really_ doesn’t want to.

“I—can you do it over?”

She expects Daryl to bare his teeth and growl at her, to ask her how the hell she could’ve grown up in rural Georgia knowing so little about firearms, but instead he’s remarkably—well, _patient_ might be stretching it, but he’s a better teacher than she would’ve expected him to be, anyway, had she given it any thought.

So, no, he doesn’t snap at her. Just says, “Pay closer attention this time,” and puts the Browning back together before dissembling it once again. He did it fast the first go round, too fast for Beth to follow, big hands a blur of motion as they took the gun apart with all the habitual grace of someone doing something by rote, because _of course_ it was by rote. Beth knows what it looks like when someone’s done something so many times that they don’t even have to think about it anymore; it’s probably how _she_ looks when she milks a cow or braids her hair or plays an easy tune on the piano.

He does it slow, now, slow but somehow still too fast for Beth as she struggles to identify the disparate components that he rattled off when he first sat her down at the kitchen table. He’s taken it apart and fitted it back together before she can remember each of the names for all of its parts.

She blinks down at the assembled gun, big and heavy and mean looking—not at all unlike the man who owns it. Instead of reaching for it, she asks what she thinks is a fair question.

“Why’re you teaching me all this, anyway?”

 _Now_ he’s starting to look impatient. “Why the hell you think? That pig sticker won’t do you no good from a distance—”

 _Hff_. Well. Beth’d hardly call a knife the length of her forearm a _pig sticker_ , but what does she know?

“—an’ the closer you get to them things, the easier it is for ’em to get their teeth in ya. Christ, girl, how the hell’d you grow up in backwoods fuckin’ Georgia without knowin’ a damn thing about firearms?” 

 _And there it is._ “Otis tried to teach me,” she says, more defensively than she’d like, “but I didn’t wanna learn.”

“Why the hell not?”

She finally tears her eyes away from the heavy barrel of the gun and meets Daryl’s dubious squint. He’ll probably scoff at her explanation, but _he’s_ the one who asked, so, _there_.

“I just…I don’t like to hurt anythin’ that’s living, I guess. It’s not like we _needed_ to hunt to put food on the table, anyway, so I didn’t see the point in learning.”

Daryl doesn’t scoff, but his mouth _does_ twist, jagged as a scar that healed all wrong.

“Yeah, well,” he says, “some folks ain’t so lucky.” He indicates the Browning with a jerk of his chin. “G’on. I ain’t teachin’ you how to shoot till you learn to take that thing apart.”

Beth sucks her lower lip into her mouth and gnaws on it anxiously as she wraps her hand around the Browning’s grip. It never looked particularly big when Merle was holding it, but in her hand, it feels huge and awkward, heavy and dangerous.

And it’s all of those things. It is.

But like it or not, she’s gotta learn her way around it.

She shoves her thumb against the release, and the magazine slides smoothly out of the chamber and into her waiting hand. Daryl doesn’t praise her for getting that much right, and why should he? It’s easy enough to find and press a button, and this was never the part that confused her, anyway.

He shakes his head, though, when she goes to retract the slide. “Check the chamber first.”

“But I know it’s empty—”

“Don’t matter. Check it anyway. Gotta make a habit outta that shit. You wanna shoot your damn eye out or what?”

 _You’ll shoot your eye out, kid,_ Beth thinks with a throb of grim amusement, but she doesn’t say it out loud. Merle’d probably laugh, but she doubts Daryl’d appreciate her screwing around while he’s trying to teach her how to protect herself.

So she does as he says, checking the chamber for the cartridge she _knows_ isn’t there anymore, although she can’t resist saying, “It’s empty,” with a studied sort of innocence.

“Smartass,” says Daryl, and Beth pinches her lips together to keep from smirking, giving him a guileless, wide-eyed look that he meets with a scowl.

Yeah, okay. She relents, locking the slide and engaging the safety lever. She probably shouldn’t talk while she does this—Daryl’ll just shush her, and she really _should_ be concentrating on what she’s doing—but the thing he said about some people not being so lucky is nagging at her. She never thought that the Dixons hunted for pure sport—men like them usually don’t—but now she’s curious.

“Who taught you all this, anyway?” she asks as she removes the slide stop from the pistol frame. “Merle? Your dad?”

Daryl’s chair creaks as he shifts his weight, but he doesn’t respond to her prying. Probably best that he doesn’t, because now she’s concentrating on pulling the slide rearward— _rearward_ , not forward—and releasing the thumb safety. The slide moves off the frame, and Beth holds onto it as she releases the recoil spring guide from the barrel. Then she removes the spring and its guide and blows out a breath that stirs loose strands of her hair. What next, what next? Remove the barrel? She thinks that’s it—

“My dad’s the one who taught me how to hunt,” Daryl says, and Beth gives him a startled look, fingers freezing on the gun’s barrel. He’s chewing on his thumbnail and looking at her hands, probably so he can catch her mistakes. “I was out there in the woods with ’im soon as I could walk.”

The disassembled gun lying forgotten in her hands, Beth asks, “Was it fun? Huntin’ with your dad?”

Daryl’s eyebrows pull together. His teeth tighten around the tip of his thumb, and for a second, Beth’s afraid that he’ll bite right through the bone.

He doesn’t; he pops his thumb out of his mouth and drums his fingers against the tabletop. “Yeah, we froze our asses off in a tree blind at four in the fuckin’ mornin’ ’cause it was _fun_. If we didn’t hunt, we didn’t eat; why the hell else’d we be out there?” He nods at the gun. “Finish takin’ that thing apart.”

Oh. Right. Beth does as she’s told, removing the barrel and setting it down on the table beside the rest of it, parts scattered in front of her like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. She wasn’t timing herself or anything, and she doesn’t think Daryl was, either, but she knows she took way too long, anyhow.

“I’m too slow,” she mumbles, and she isn’t just talking about the gun. Yeah, she’s fast enough on her feet, but she’s too slow to react, too slow to protect herself. So far, she hasn’t _had_ to protect herself, because Daryl and Merle’ve done all the protecting _for_ her. What happens if she gets separated from them again? What happens if they get hurt in ways they can’t come back from?

What if they end up like Georgia?

She can’t let that happen. She’s gotta get better. She has to.

“’Course you’re slow,” says Daryl, and Beth stares at him, caught off guard. He’s not insulting her, she doesn’t think; his tone’s too matter of fact. “You’re just startin’ out. Ain’t no use in bitchin’ about it; all’s you can do is practice till you _ain’t_ slow no more.”

Beth’s eyes burn, and her throat closes like a fist.

He’s being kind to her, in his own brusque way. So why does she feel like crying?

She doesn’t, though. She doesn’t cry. No, what she does is blink hard and turn her wobbling lips up into a smile.

“You’d make a fine motivational speaker, Mr. Dixon, if you put your mind to it.”

Daryl’s ears turn red. “Shut the hell up,” he says, but he doesn’t sound especially pissed off. Exasperated, maybe. Embarrassed, definitely. But not angry.

Beth thinks they might be getting along, actually.

So, in the spirit of maintaining their tentative camaraderie, she tames her smile and decides to spare Daryl any further discomfort. “Can you walk me through putting it back together again? Please?”

“Don’t gotta ask,” Daryl mutters, his blush fading. “M’ the one who said you better learn, ain’t I?”

It doesn’t take her as long to put it back together as it did to pull it apart, and before she knows it, she’s holding an assembled gun in her hands. She clicks the safety back on, figuring that doing so will make her feel a little less anxious about holding it, but the difference is so negligible as to be practically nonexistent.

Because she still hates the way it feels, hates the way it looks, hates that she might one day be expected to point it at a living person and not just something that _used_ to be a person. Daryl said she needed to learn how to use a long-range weapon in order to lessen her chances of getting bit, but she suspects he had the men from the Walmart in mind—or at least, men _like_ them in mind—when he sat her down at this table.

She remembers how Buck Knife looked at her. She remembers, and it makes her shiver like she’s got the chills.

She shakes it off as best she can. Sets the gun down on the table and chafes her empty hands against her thighs like she can rub away the sense memory of the Browning’s cold metal on her skin.

“You gonna teach me how to shoot now?” she asks Daryl. It’s not like she’s eager to learn, but she’s curious. How exactly does he intend to go about it? She can hardly fire a gun in the house, not if she doesn’t want the blast to destroy their eardrums, not to mention bullets ricocheting off the walls and ceiling. But outdoors target practice—that’s dangerous, too, for obvious reasons.

Daryl scrubs his chin, tugs on his short beard. “Gotta set somethin’ up first,” he decides. “Can’t go wastin’ too many bullets, an’ we gotta be ready to run if one’a them things hears all the ruckus an’ comes lookin’.”

“Yeah,” says Beth. “That’s what I was thinkin’.” She traces her fingers over the tabletop’s cheap laminate, gets sidetracked by the pile of newspapers and circulars that Daryl shoved to one side earlier to clear up space for their lesson. She snags one by the corner, turns it over and scans lurid red print advertising _FREE CARPET INSTALLATIONS_. “Y’know, I never did get why they were called circulars.”

Daryl gives her a _what the fuck are you on about_ this _time_ look, which she expected. What she doesn’t expect is for him to answer her rhetorical not-question. “’Cause they go in the circular filing cabinet.”

“The what?”

“Trash can.”

“ _Oh_.” Beth laughs, probably harder than she should, hard enough to rock her forward in her seat. It was funny, yeah, but it wasn’t _that_ funny, and she doesn’t know why it amused her so much. Could be she’s just _that_ starved for joy.

Daryl wasn’t expecting her to laugh that hard, either, by the looks of him. He blinks at her like she startled him, but only the once, and for an undetermined amount of seconds after that, he doesn’t blink at all. Beth struggles to identify the look on his face, convinced that she’s seen it before, and then it clicks.

He’s looking at her like he had when she sang that Johnny Cash song for him and Merle, and her face goes hot the minute she recognizes it. Her face goes hot, and her fingertips tremble, and her stomach spools up tight. She can’t breathe. She can’t. She _can’t_ —

She can. She can, because Daryl blinks. He blinks and whips his head to one side, and she follows his gaze, twisting in her seat. The house is sealed up tight, and nothing’s getting in without first making a helluva racket. Merle was dozing in the living room, last she saw, so what—?

Oh. She hears it now. Faint, but growing stronger the harder she listens. Voices. Voices, and the sound of a car door clapping shut.

Beth’s on her feet as soon as she processes what she’s hearing— _slow,_ still too slow—and Daryl’s already standing, snatching up the Browning and clicking the safety off. Beth side eyes the gun and shuffles out of his way as he goes stalking out of the kitchen and down the hall, then trails hesitantly in his wake, at once hopeful and wary.

She remembers the curtains that shivered on the day they arrived here. She’s given them some thought since then, but she hasn’t dared to venture across the street to check for further signs of life, and she’s not sure which made her more cautious—the potential for running into monsters, or the potential for running into more people like Revolver and his friends.

Daryl goes up to one of the windows framing the front door and twitches the curtain aside. His head tilts.

“Well, shit,” he says. He doesn’t sound very alarmed, so Beth decides not to worry too much. Yet.

“What is it?” She comes up beside him, and he shuffles over to make room. He doesn’t answer her question, but he doesn’t need to, because now she’s the one who’s looking through the crack in the curtain, blinking hard as her eyes adjust to the sudden knife of daylight. As her brain adjusts to what she’s _seeing_.

“Must be movin’ day,” says Daryl.

“Looks like,” Beth agrees, eyes on the house across the street—more specifically, on the minivan that’s parked in its short driveway. Was it always there? It might’ve been. If it was, her brain dismissed it as unimportant, not worth retaining.

Whether it was always there or not doesn’t matter, anyway—what matters is that it’s there _now_ , trunk popped, sliding door hanging open as a stream of people rush in and out of the garage, arms piled high with bags, boxes, loose stacks of clothes.

Beth counts five people total, although it’s hard to tell for certain, with all of them scurrying around like that. Four of them look roughly adult sized, but one’s small, even smaller than Beth. A kid, probably, or at least a younger teenager.

Beth grips the hilt of her knife. She’s started doing that whenever she’s anxious, even when there isn’t an immediate threat bearing down on her, like a child clinging to a security blanket.

“Where d’you think they’re goin’?” she wonders. It’s a rhetorical question—by all accounts, there’s nowhere _to_ go—but Daryl shrugs and answers it anyway.

“Don’t matter,” he says. “Ain’t our business.”

Beth shoots him an aside glance. “You really don’t care? What if somethin’ happens to them?”

“That ain’t my goddamn problem. I dunno them people, an’ I don’t owe ’em shit.”

“You didn’t know _me_ , either, and you helped me out anyway.”

Daryl clicks the Browning’s safety back on. “That’s diff’rent,” he says, and pulls the curtain shut.

Right. It’s different because he feels _responsible_ for her. That was what Merle said, wasn’t it? He thinks it’s his fault she’s stuck out here, so he’s trying to make amends for his perceived mistake. Just trying to make things square.

Still. Some people—a lot of people—wouldn’t feel beholden to her at all, would just say, _Tough titty, kiddo. That’s what you get for staying out past curfew and fucking a stranger in the back of a goddamn truck._

Daryl’s a good person, and if not entirely good, then at least _decent_. A decent man wouldn’t be left completely unmoved by the helplessness of a stranger.

Daryl’s already turned away from the window, but Beth lingers and peers outside again, looking up and down the tree-lined street—

And feels a sick lurch in her stomach when she spots the monsters stumbling closer and closer to the family with the minivan. There’s only two of them that Beth can see, but the family doesn’t seem to’ve noticed, too caught up in their frantic activity to pay enough attention to their surroundings.

Beth doesn’t hesitate. She lets the curtain drop, wheels around, and bolts after Daryl, grabbing him by the wrist and refusing to let go even when he rounds on her with bared teeth.

He wrenches out of her grip, hard enough to make her fingers sting. “The fuck’re you—”

“There’re monsters out there. Comin’ right at ’em. If we don’t do somethin’, they’ll die.”

Daryl’s scowl drops, but he doesn’t go charging outside to save those people, either. “Yeah, and? They prob’ly got a gun. Wouldn’t be out there if they didn’t. They’ll be alrigh’.”

“You don’t _know_ that.”

“I ain’t gonna—”

“You don’t know that,” Beth repeats, staring him down and refusing to blink, to fold. “But you _do_ know that _we’re_ armed. You know we could help those people. It’d be wrong not to and you _know_ it, Daryl.”

Daryl’s mouth twists. He looks a little bit like he wants to hit something, but Beth doesn’t flinch, because she knows, somehow, that he’d never strike _her_ no matter how angry he got. He’ll shout and steam and say hurtful things, but he won’t lash out with his fists, not against someone who’s smaller and weaker than he is.

It’s like she said: he’s decent. You’d think he wouldn’t be, with a brother like Merle to set his example, but he is.

And Beth isn’t afraid of him.

“ _Shit_ ,” he says— _spits_ —and that’s how Beth knows she’s won. He wouldn’t look that pissed off if she’d lost the argument. He spins around, stomps into the kitchen, storms back out with Merle’s handgun in his waistband and his crossbow in his arms. He doesn’t look at Beth on his way to the door, doesn’t say another word to her, but she follows him anyway, unsheathing her knife and holding it in a backhand grip.

He hears her coming and throws a glare over his shoulder, but he doesn’t tell her to stay inside, either, so she figures she’s allowed to come along. She’d fight him if he told her to hang back, anyway, because he needs somebody to watch out for him, even if she can’t do much more than that. Even if the most she can do is alert him with a shout should a monster sneak up on him while he’s distracted by something else.

She still hasn’t killed any herself. Would very much like to not have to.

Crossing the narrow street feels like crossing a desert, or maybe an endless river of pavement, heart pounding in her throat and her ears, eyes darting left and right and up and down as adrenaline blurs her vision and makes her muscles jerk. God, she feels so exposed. Is this how rabbits feel when they dart across an open field, risking their lives just by coming out of their warrens, never knowing when a hawk might descend with an open beak and ready talons?

Is this how it feels to be prey?

She wonders if Daryl feels like prey. She can’t imagine that he does. Can’t imagine that he ever has. He certainly isn’t acting like prey right now, as he releases a bolt into the first monster’s skull, gets up close to the second one’s snapping teeth and bludgeons it over the head with his crossbow before drawing his Bowie knife and cutting deep into its brain.

It’s over in less than a minute, like it never happened at all, and Beth looks away from the gory sight of Daryl dragging his bolt out of the first monster’s skull to find the family of five staring at them. Mostly at Daryl. Mostly at his weapons.

Back to Daryl, who’s hefting his bow and slamming his knife into its sheath. He tilts his head at Beth as though to ask, _Well? You satisfied now or what?_

 _Or what,_ Beth decides as she starts up the sidewalk towards the family, knife sheathed, hands loose and open at her sides, doing her best to look as harmless as possible. As if she needs to bother. As if she’s the one they’re wary of.

But she stops a decent distance away from them just in case they _are_ suspicious of her and her motives, struggling for what to say.

She settles on, “Hi.”

She feels stupid, saying it. It _sounds_ stupid.

No. Not _stupid_ , exactly. More like it just doesn’t fit.

Like it doesn’t fit this brave new world they’re living in.

The older man—the _only_ man, actually; the other one is just a boy, Beth realizes, around her age at a guess—sets down the carton he was carrying and brushes his dark hair out of his eyes. The woman—his wife?—fiddles with her blond ponytail, visibly uncomfortable, but she’s the one who eventually speaks up.

“You’re not—you’re not from around here, are you? I don’t recognize you. Him, either.”

“No, um. My—” Beth cranes a look over her shoulder, both to check for monsters and to check in on Daryl, who’s hovering maybe three feet behind her and slightly to her left, hulking and armed and not doing them any favors at all with the forbidding scowl on his face. “My brothers and I are holin’ up in that yellow house across the street. Did y’all know the people who lived there? The, uh, the door was open, so…”

The man and the woman seem to relax fractionally when Beth says _brothers_ , when she tells them the same lie she told Revolver and his friends. They’re not about to invite Beth and Daryl inside for lunch, but they look a little more open now. A little more inclined to pursue a civil conversation.

“Yeah,” says the woman. She crosses her arms, hunching in on herself like she’s cold even though today’s as balmy as all the days before it’ve been, ripening the ever-present smell of rot. “Lotta busted-open doors ’round here. Guess we’re just lucky that _ours_ hasn’t been busted in yet.”

Her husband steps into her side, wraps his arm around her shoulders and chafes his hand against her elbow. Beth thinks of her own parents, of how they’d lean on each other both emotionally and physically when times got tough, and she has to drop her eyes to the sidewalk, to the weeds growing up through the cracks.

“Won’t have to worry about that for much longer, at least,” says the man, and Beth tears her eyes away from a spring of dandelions just in time to catch the wry twist to his mouth.

“Y’all movin’ on?” she asks, even though it’s obvious that they are. But, hey. Niceties.

“Yeah,” the man admits. “Headin’ out for Fort Benning. How ’bout y’all?”

Daryl comes up beside Beth, shoulder brushing hers, and she hesitates. Where _are_ they headed? Returning to the farm is her ultimate goal, at least, but they aren’t going anywhere until Merle’s made a full recovery.

“Dunno just yet,” is what she settles on, and silent reasserts itself in the wake of her non-answer, tense and awkward and punctuated by wary looks twisted over their shoulders. It’s the boy who eventually breaks it, pointing his chin at Daryl—no, at the gun tucked into his waistband.

“Y’all got any more’a those?” he asks, and Daryl shifts, body language closing off even tighter than it’d been a second ago.

“Y’all ain’t armed?” she asks, ignoring Daryl’s quelling look. What’s his problem, anyway? It’s not like they don’t have weapons to spare, thanks to the gun-happy owner of that hunting cabin. 

They don’t answer her right away, and she can understand why. They don’t want to admit to being unarmed when the strangers who just rolled up to them clearly are. And, Jesus, why _aren’t_ they armed? Sure, it’s the suburbs, but it’s also _Georgia_. Folks ’round here take their Second Amendment rights real damn serious.

“We got some spare guns,” Beth blurts into the silence, talking over the sound of Daryl’s angry hiss. “Ammo, too. We can share.” 

The woman opens her mouth, something like tentative hope dawning on her face, but whatever she was gonna get say gets bitten off between her teeth when Daryl rounds on Beth, fists clenching and face flushing.

She doesn’t flinch. Still.

“You fuckin’ serious right now?” he demands, too loud in the quiet of the deserted street, and Beth hears one of the girls—the younger one, she thinks—make a noise not unlike a muffled whimper.

Beth’s cheeks burn, and her shoulders cave in on themselves like he’s—like he’s causing a _scene_ or something, ridiculous as that sounds, like he’s picking a vocal fight in a damn parking lot or something. She shouldn’t be embarrassed—embarrassment ought to be the _least_ of her concerns—but somehow, she is.

“What’s your _problem_?” she asks, lowering her voice like she can convince him to modulate his by example. “It wouldn’t hurt to just—”

“To jus’ _what_? Huh? To jus’ give away our ammo like fuckin’ Halloween candy? That shit goes quicker’n you think, girl—”

“Um, excuse me?” Beth and Daryl turn in sync to look at the woman, and Beth can’t tell if the concerned expression on her face is for her family or for Beth. Maybe a bit of both? “Y’all really don’t need to bother, alright? We’re gonna be in our car the whole time; we oughta be good—”

“No, you _won’t_ be good,” Beth cuts in, too worked up to remember what her parents taught her about minding her manners in front of adults. “Y’all’ve been holed up in your house since this all started, right? So you don’t know what it’s like out there. It’s…” God, she doesn’t have the words for what it is. “You’ll wanna be armed. Trust me.”

Neither the man nor the woman say anything—neither do their kids, hovering in the background and clinging to their worldly possessions, to the pieces of a former life. Beth turns pleading eyes on Daryl and finds him standing there with his hands clenched tight around his crossbow, upper lip curling like a snarling dog.

“C’mon,” she says softly. “Please?”

He has to know that this is the right thing to do. He has to.

Daryl’s jaw tightens. He turns his head, spits on the sidewalk, and goes storming across the street without another word, hopping their makeshift alarm and slamming the door shut behind him.

Beth watches him go, eyes wide, lips parted. Cold fingers dig into her gut and wrap her stomach up in an icy fist. What is he—is he gonna _leave_ her—?

A hand brushes over Beth’s arm, and she jerks away from the point of contact, unused to being touched after nearly two weeks away from her friends and family. She stares at the woman, who’s looking at her in a way that makes her want to cry, it reminds her so much of her mother.

“Honey,” she says. “Look, I get that you don’t know us from Adam, but if you need help—if you need to get away, you can—”

But she never gets the rest of her offer out. Movement flashes in the corner of Beth’s eye, and her hand drops to her knife, curls around the hilt—but it’s not a monster, it’s Daryl, his crossbow clutched in one hand and a backpack swinging from the other, the long muzzles of two shotguns poking out of a flap in the canvas. He seems to cross the street in the time it takes Beth to blink, and then he’s hurling the bag onto the sidewalk with a clatter, a box of ammo spilling out and skidding to a stop at her feet.  

His good deed done, he jerks his chin at Beth. “C’mon.”

Beth takes an automatic step forward, but the woman’s hand closes around her wrist, stilling her.

“She doesn’t have to go anywhere with you,” the woman says, tone could enough to give Beth chills. Oh, Jesus, but she’s got it all wrong. Beth needs to explain, she needs to—

Except she’s starting to doubt she’ll get the chance to, because Daryl’s already shutting down, closing off. Beth can see it in his eyes, in his face, in the set of his shoulders. In the curl of his snarling lip, still so much like a dog about to bite. To turn on the hand that feeds it and lash out.

“That what you want?” he asks Beth, but it’s not really a question. Not in any what that counts. “We ain’t good ’nough for you, princess? You movin’ onto greener pastures now?”

Beth’s heart feels stuck to the walls of her throat. “No, I—”

“Nah.” Daryl shakes his head. He won’t look her in the eye. She needs him to _look her in the eye_. “Nah, I get it. You wanna fuck off, don’t lemme stop you. I’m sick’a lookin’ after your sorry ass, anyways.”

Beth’s heart drops out of her throat and into her feet.

She wishes he hadn’t said that. God, she wishes he hadn’t, because now—

Now she’ll _have_ to leave, won’t she?

She doesn’t say anything, because what use is there in speaking up when the other person doesn’t want to listen? She doesn’t say anything, and with a stranger’s fingers riding her hammering pulse, she tilts her chin. Looks Daryl square in the eye.

Nods.

Okay. Alright. Fine.

He’s done with her? Then she’s done with him, too.

She’s just _done_.

Daryl’s lower lip trembles. His lashes flutter against his cheekbones. For a second, _half_ a second, Beth’s convinced that he’s bluffing, that he’s just waiting for her to say that she’s not going anywhere without him. That he didn’t mean a word of what he just said.

But he yanks Merle’s Browning free of his waistband. Tosses it at Beth’s feet.

Turns around wordlessly and returns to the thin yellow house. Returns to it without her.

And Beth—she’s not feeling much of anything, but only, she suspects, to protect herself from feeling too much of _everything_.

It’ll all come crashing down on her eventually, though. She knows it will.

The door claps shut behind him.

He’s gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the part where I ask you guys to trust me. I hate misery porn, and I never put characters through the wringer if I don't already have something good waiting in the wings. Just don't hate me, alright? I promise to make it up to you soon, and I think you're gonna like what I've got planned for Beth and Daryl. Most of it, anyway ❤️


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fort Benning. She’ll stick with the Rhodeses until they get to Fort Benning, and then she’ll, what? Find a way to contact her family? Hitch another ride?
> 
> She’ll think of something. She will. She’ll get back to the farm eventually.
> 
> She just needs to have a little faith.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [But it doesn't mean you ain't been on my mind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKuz27nkDEs).
> 
> Hi! I've included spoiler-y chapter specific warnings in the end notes. 
> 
> ❤️

“That guy back there—he wasn’t really your brother, was he?”

Beth leans her forehead against the window and watches the landscape flash by, feeling every pothole they jolt over in the backs of her teeth. She doesn’t look away from the blur of trees and pavement when she asks, “What makes you say that?”

She’s sharing the minivan’s backseat with Max and Reagan’s youngest daughter, Abbey. Unlike her dark-haired siblings, she takes after her mother, fine boned and blond. She’s also apparently incapable of minding her own business, although Beth hasn’t known the Rhodeses long enough to guess which parent she inherited _that_ trait from.

How long has it been since they started driving, anyway? Fifteen minutes? Twenty?

“Y’all don’t look much alike.”

Beth straightens up, her cheek and the side of her forehead a little numb from the cool glass, and turns to look across the bench seat at Abbey, who’s looking curiously back.

“We’re half siblings,” says Beth. She’s not sure _why_ she says it, why she’s keeping up the lie. Could just be that she doesn’t want to deal with the explosion of questions and concerns that telling the truth would bring.

“Oh,” says Abbey. Her hands fidget in her lap, and Beth notices for the first time that she’s wearing chipped polish on her nails. Pale blue, like her eyes. “Is he a lot older than you? He looks like he is.”

Beth slumps, seatbelt biting into her chest, knees knocking into the seat in front of her. If Abbey’s big sister Megan minds, she doesn’t turn around to say so. Of course, she’s probably too freaked out by everything else that’s going on to notice.

“Yeah,” says Beth. “Yeah, he’s older than me.”

“How much older?”

Beth shuts her eyes. Fists her hands in her lap. The Browning bites into her abdomen where she shoved it down her waistband, and every time she moves, every time she _breathes_ too hard, she wonders if the safety will slide off and cause her to accidentally shoot herself in the leg.

 _Wonders_ , yeah, but doesn’t really worry about it. She probably should. But she doesn’t.

How old _is_ Daryl, anyway? Beth’s not sure. Merle’s probably in his forties or fifties, but Daryl? He _looks_ like he could be well into his thirties, and he probably is, but he doesn’t act like it.

Hell, for the most part, he acts _Beth’s_ age.

“Fifteen,” Beth decides, because it’s as good a guess as any. “He’s fifteen years older than me.”

“Jeez, that’s a lot. Are your parents still alive?”

Beth’s hands twitch. That’s a good question. She wishes she had a certain answer.

Not even a _good_ answer. Just a certain one.

“I dunno,” she says quietly, and when she opens her eyes, it’s to the sight of Abbey’s older brother twisting in his seat to glare at his sister.

“Hey! Leave her alone, would you? You’re bein’ an asshole.”

“Tyler’s right.” The look on Megan’s face is a match for her brother’s, sharp and repressive. “You need to mind your business.”

“Settle down back there,” says Reagan, like they’re just another antsy, bickering family on a road trip, and Megan and Tyler turn to face front again, but not before Tyler offers Beth what she’s probably supposed to take as a reassuring smile.

She wishes she had it in her to smile back.

Abbey pokes Beth in the arm, grimacing apologetically when they lock eyes.

Apparently, she turned thirteen last month, but she looks closer to ten. Beth gets that. She’s always looked young for her age, too.

She thinks of Daryl calling her _jailbait_ back at the gas station to get Merle to leave her alone. Curls her fists a little tighter.

“Uh, hey,” says Abbey. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine,” Beth cuts in before Abbey can finish apologizing. “Don’t worry about it.”

She’s being uncharacteristically terse, and the way Abbey’s face falls doesn’t make her feel especially _good_ about herself, but she just can’t deal with this right now. She has to _think_.

Fort Benning. She’ll stick with the Rhodeses until they get to Fort Benning, and then she’ll, what? Find a way to contact her family? Hitch another ride?

She’ll think of something. She will. She’ll get back to the farm eventually, she just—she just needs to have a little faith.

She presses a hand to her sternum, over her saint’s medal. She grips it through her shirt. Shuts her eyes.

 _Please, God_. _Please just let me find them again. I don’t care how long it takes. Just let me find my way back home._

She loses track of the time, sitting there like that, eyes shut and hand over her heart like she’s taking a vow. Could be a few minutes since she started praying. Could as easily be half an hour. All she knows for certain is that she doesn’t open her eyes again until the van starts to slow.

_What’s going on now?_

Beth didn’t see a single car pass them by while she was staring out the window earlier. Have they finally caught up with all the other people who’re heading south? Have they run into another gridlock like the one she saw on the way to the farm?

She sits forward in her seat and peers out the distant windshield. She sees cars—lots of cars—but it’s hard to tell if they’re standing stock still or just creeping forward very, very slowly.

Max and Reagan are speaking to each other in the front seat, too quietly for Beth to hear over the hum of the engine and the crackle of the radio. She exchanges a look with Abbey, then taps Megan on the shoulder.

“What’s goin’ on out there?”

Megan’s are lips pursed, and she looks real pale around the eyes. “Nothin’,” she says. “ _Nothin’s_ goin’ on out there. That’s the problem.”

Beth thinks she knows where this is going, but she still asks, “What d’you mean?”

Tyler turns to face the backseat, then, and his face is just as bleak as older sister’s. “None of those cars up there’re movin’. I don’t—I don’t think there’s anybody _in_ them.”

“Oh,” Beth says quietly, because what the hell _else_ is she gonna say? _Oh, too bad about that. Looks like we’re fucked?_

She looks out the window, at the northbound lane. The cars over there aren’t moving, either, and when she shades her eyes and presses in close to the glass, she finds that they’re all empty, too.

No. Not entirely empty. One of them, a blue Nissan Altima, hasn’t been abandoned by its driver. Except—except there’s something off about the way they’re just _sitting there_ , unnaturally still and slumped to one side, head hanging limply on their neck. They could just be taking a nap, if not for the dark stain arcing across the windshield.

Beth flinches away from the window as soon as she processes what she’s seeing, nausea twisting in her gut. God. _God_.

“Mom,” says Megan. “What’re we gonna do? Are we gonna turn around?”

Reagan holds up a quelling hand and leans across the console to consult Max before saying to Megan, “Just—give it a minute, alright? Your dad’s gonna try and see if there’s a way around this.”

“There _isn’t_ ,” Megan insists. “I think we should turn around.”

“Megan, just _be_ _quiet_ and let us figure this out.”

Megan snaps something back, but Beth’s not paying attention to the escalating argument anymore. She’s not, because she’s too busy staring at the monster that’s stumbled into view.

It’s dressed in business casuals and heading south down the median that cuts between the two lanes. It doesn’t appear to have noticed them yet, and they’re safe inside the van, so after breathing through the initial jolt of instinctive fear, Beth gathers her scrambled thoughts and insists to herself that they ought to be fine.

Except it’s never really fine, is it? It never is.

“Oh my God,” Abbey whispers. Her seatbelt’s unbuckled, and she’s sitting up on her knees, facing the rear windshield. Her mouth is hanging open, and she’s white knuckling the headrest like a lifeline.

Beth unbuckles her seatbelt and turns around, too. What she sees makes her stomach plummet like a runaway elevator.

_See? It’s never fine. Not anymore._

The monster walking on the median isn’t alone, after all. There are more trailing after it, and more still in the southbound lane. Too many to count. Way, way too many to count.

“Mom!” Abbey says, too loud. Beth shushes her, but she’s not listening, tears shining on her white face as she scrambles forward to stand between Tyler and Megan’s seats and grab at Reagan’s shoulder. “Mom, look—”

Reagan shakes her off, turns around. “Goddammit, Abbey, what’re you—”

She never gets the rest of that sentence out. Her teeth click together, and the scowl melts off her face as her skin drains of color. She turns back around and adjusts the rearview mirror, like she wants to make sure that her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her the first time around.

Yeah. They should be so lucky.

“Shit,” she says. “ _Shit_ —Max, is there enough room to keep goin’ forward?”  

“Huh? Not unless we get outside and move those cars ourselves—”

“Yeah,” says Tyler. His eyes are fixed on the rear windshield. Beth can’t remember the last time she saw him blink. “That’s not an option.”

Max looks in the rearview mirror. Pales.

“ _Fuck_.”

Pretty much.

Megan swallows audibly. “Can we—can we drive on the median?”

Maybe they could. There’s only a few monsters over there, and they could feasibly bowl them over like Daryl had back at the roadhouse.

Max doesn’t say anything, just puts the van in reverse, takes his foot off the brakes, and spins the wheel, angling the van at the median before putting it in drive again. Okay. Looks like he’s gonna go along with his daughter’s suggestion.

Except. Except the revving of the van’s engine must’ve finally caught the monsters’ attention, because now they’re slowly turning as one to face the southbound lane, feet shuffling through the scrubby grass and stumbling onto the pavement, rotting hands outstretched.

Someone cries out. Beth’s not sure who, but she’s certain it wasn’t her. She doesn’t think she could make a noise right now if she tried.

She looks over her shoulder. The monsters in the southbound lane are getting closer, the monsters from the median are too, and they’re walled off on two sides by abandoned cars.

They’re not going anywhere. The realization comes to Beth quietly, and without any overt sense of horror. It’s just a fact. They’re trapped. No getting out of it.

They’re done.

Abbey shrieks when something slams into van’s bumper and rocks it forward on its shocks. When Beth looks for the source of the noise, she finds that a small herd of monsters have hurled themselves at the rear windshield, fingernails scratching at the glass. Abbey hunches in on herself, tears streaming down her face, and from the smell that’s filling the backseat, Beth suspects that she just wet herself.  

More hit the van from the side, then, piling on densely enough to block out the sunlight. Beth watches them do it, and still doesn’t feel much of anything at all.

But at least that absence of feeling has given her a new sense of clarity.

“We gotta leave the van,” she says, positive that it’s the right thing to do—the _only_ thing to do, really, aside from lie down and wait to die. They can’t run them over now; there are too many of them packed in too close. A wall of dead flesh.

“ _What_?” Tyler snaps, but Beth doesn’t fault him for his tone. Fear has a way of making people angry. “Are you fuckin’ crazy?”

Maybe a little. “There’s nothin’ else we _can_ do. If we stay here, they’ll just keep piling up. Might even knock the van over. That what you want?”

She says it bluntly, no sugarcoating it. Says it the way Daryl would say it, if he were here.

Thinking of Daryl, she pulls the Browning out of her jeans and wraps her hand around the grip. Doesn’t slide the safety off, though. Not yet.

“She’s right,” Megan says flatly, ignoring Tyler’s bug-eyed look. Outside, a monster slams its head against the glass. “We gotta go. Mom, are you listening? We gotta go.”

Reagan pulls the bag of guns out of the footwell and into her lap. “Yeah,” she says, even though her voice is shaking. “Yeah, I’m listening.”

Max squeezes the steering wheel. “We can’t—”

“We can’t stay _here_ ,” Reagan stresses, and passes Max one of the two shotguns. She checks that hers is loaded, then snaps it back shut with the air of someone revisiting an old habit.

For a lady who doesn’t own any guns, Beth thinks, Reagan sure seems to know her way around them. Maybe it’s a remnant of a former life. Maybe she spent most of her childhood up in a tree blind, too.

Reagan climbs out of the front seat and squats between her two older children. Strokes her hand through Megan’s long hair.

“Now, y’all listen to me,” she says, looking each of them in the eye in turn. “You too, Abbey. I’m gonna open that door—”

“Don’t!” Abbey blurts, and Reagan gives her a sharp look before carrying on.

“I’m gonna open that door,” she repeats, “and your dad and I are gonna take enough of those things down to clear a path. Then you’re gonna run, alright? You’re gonna make a break for that bus—” She points out a clear space in the window toward the far side of the northbound lane, to the big yellow school bus parked crookedly on the shoulder. “—and then you’re gonna hide inside of it and wait for us, alright? You understand me?”

“ _No_.” Abbey gropes for her mother’s hand and clings to it. She’s shaking so hard it’s making her teeth chatter. “No, I don’t wanna—”

“You’re _gonna_ ,” Reagan says, but then she softens some. Squeezes her daughter’s hand and leans forward to kiss her damp cheek. “Your daddy and I are gonna be fine, sweetheart. But we gotta stay behind. We gotta keep those things from comin’ after you.”

Abbey doesn’t say anything, just shakes her head and sobs, and Beth reaches across the seat to take her other hand. Abbey latches on tight, squeezing hard enough to grind Beth’s bones together.

Reagan nods at Beth. At the Browning. “You know how to use that thing?” she asks, just like Daryl had when he gave her his knife.

“Yeah,” Beth says, and it’s not exactly a lie. Point and shoot, right? Point and shoot.

“Alright,” says Reagan. “Good.” She leans her cheek against the top of Tyler’s head and shuts her eyes for a moment before opening them again. They’re bright with unshed tears. “Time to go, kids, c’mon.”

Time to go.

Beth and Abbey stand up and squat between the middle seats, and Max climbs out of the front seat to grip the door handle and wait for his wife’s signal, but not before squeezing Megan’s knee and mouthing _I love you_ to his kids.  

Beth thumbs the Browning’s safety off. “Hey,” she says to Max and Reagan, not continuing until she’s certain she has their attention. “Aim for the head.”

Reagan raises her shotgun. Sights down the barrel.

Nods.

Max wrenches the sliding door open, and Reagan fires, and fires, and fires, each successive round hitting Beth’s eardrums like a punch. Max’s lips are moving, and Beth can’t hear anything he’s saying over the ringing in her ears, but she doesn’t have to, because now he’s motioning them forward, and she’s diving out of the van after Megan and Tyler, one hand clutching the Browning and the other cuffed around Abbey’s wrist.

Reagan cleared a good-sized swathe, affording Beth and the others just enough space to rush through a gap in the median and onto the northbound lane, but then Tyler says, “ _Shit_ ,” and Beth looks over her shoulder to find more monsters coming after them. She looks forward again, toward the Nissan with the dead body in it, and comes to a decision.

“Get on the roof,” she says.

The others goggle at her. “ _What_?” says Megan, like her ears are still ringing and she thinks she heard Beth wrong.

They don’t have time for this, so Beth doesn’t bother repeating herself; just leads by example, climbing onto the Nissan’s hood and then scrambling onto the roof, dragging Abbey up after her. Megan and Tyler don’t hesitate, at least, climbing up after Abbey and Beth just as the monsters flood into the northbound lane, poised to surround them. 

Beth takes a deep breath and looks across to the next roof. They’ve gotta jump the gap into the next lane, and then head north for the school bus.

She turns the Browning’s safety back on and sticks it in her waistband. Lets go of Abbey’s hand.

Crouches. Leaps.

She almost falls, the edge of the car’s roof punching her in the stomach, but she kicks and claws the rest of the way up, bruised and winded but _alive_ , and turns around to hold a hand out to Abbey, who blanches and shakes her head.

Megan gives Abbey a nudge, her eyes on the approaching swarm. “C’mon,” she says. “It’s okay. Beth’s got you.”

Beth meets Abbey’s eyes and nods. _C’mon_ , she wills. _C’mon—_

Abbey jumps, and makes it. Sticks the landing better than Beth had, even, and then Megan and Tyler are following her, and then it’s down onto the hood and up onto the next roof, using the cars like steppingstones as more and more monsters flood into the lane, fingernails grazing Beth’s boots and scratching lines in the paintjobs.

Two more cars. Two more cars to the school bus. Just two more and then—

And then Tyler cries out.

He must’ve slipped, turned his ankle over, and Beth can’t do anything except look on in numb horror as he goes sliding off the edge of the roof behind her. Megan screams and grabs for his hands, nails carving red lines in his wrists, but she’s not the one who pulls him onto the roof.

No. He’s the one who pulls her down to the pavement and into the churn of arms and teeth.

Abbey screams and jerks forward, but Beth grabs her around the waist and yanks her back, endures her beating fists.

“ _No_ —Megan and Tyler, they—we gotta—”

“No, we _can’t_.” Beth yanks Abbey around to face her. Looks her in the eye. “We can’t, Abbey. We _can’t_ , okay? They’re gone. I’m sorry, but they’re _gone_.”

Abbey bares her teeth, and Beth wonders detachedly if she intends to bite her. “I’m not gonna—”

“You _are_ ,” Beth says, and drags her forward. Up and down, up and down, deafening herself to the sound of Abbey’s hysterical sobbing. Blank stretch of pavement, thundering footfalls as she pulls Abbey toward the back of the bus, climbing up through the open door—

And feeling her arm strain in its socket when something tries to drag them back over the edge. A monster’s wrapped its hand around Abbey’s leg, and she kicks and shrieks and clings to Beth, more a hindrance than a help.

No. _No_. This isn’t gonna happen. She won’t _let it_ —

Beth braces her feet against the bus’s corrugated metal floor, grits her teeth, and _yanks_. The monster slips and stumbles and loosens its grip, and Beth wraps her hand around Abbey’s and tugs her down the aisle, past bloodstained backpacks and loose stuffing and dark little lumps that she doesn’t want to look too hard at—but, _shit_ , she forgot to shut the back door, and she’s turning around to do just that when one of the little dark lumps moves, stirring in the seat to her left, and, oh, no, no no no, it’s child sized but it _isn’t_ a child—and, no, no, there’s _more_ of them, too many to take down with a knife and she can’t fire her gun if she doesn’t want to attract the herd on the highway, _fuck_ —

“C’mon,” Beth whispers, yanking a petrified Abbey farther down the aisle.

“But Mom said to stay here!”

Beth ignores her and thunders down the steps, off the shoulder and toward the woods, almost there, almost—

Abbey’s scream cuts into her ears like a knife. The hand in Beth’s clings for a second, then goes limp, and Beth wheels around to watch four of those not-kids take her down, teeth ripping into her neck and shoulders and tearing off long bloody strips of skin as she cries, as she shrieks, as she reaches toward Beth in wordless supplication—

A fifth monster comes stumbling down the bus’s stairs and bypasses Abbey for Beth, and her knife is in her hand, and a small body is colliding with hers, dirty fingers catching in the flannel shirt tied around her waist and tearing it off—

The blade skitters off its cheekbone and slices into its ear before finding purchase in its left eye socket and sinking home, cutting through its brain with a spray of blood and viscera that pours down the front of Beth’s shirt and jeans, bathing her in the smell of rot.

She yanks the knife free. Stumbles back. Falls onto the grass and gropes for the Browning, aiming it at the things that took Abbey down, crouched over her twitching body now and feasting like carrion on roadkill. They’re not paying Beth any attention at all.  

Her vision blurs. The gun wavers in her hand.

Point and shoot. Point and shoot.

One of them’s wearing a Power Rangers backpack.

Beth lowers the gun, turns her head, and throws up into the grass.

She doesn’t bother to wipe her mouth, just wobbles to her feet, coughing, gun in one hand and knife in the other. Her face is wet. Not just vomit. Tears.

Abbey’s hand lies outstretched in the grass. As Beth watches, her fingers curl against her palm and lie still, the blue of her nails stark against her white skin and red blood.

Beth lurches back a step. Two.

She runs.

 

* * *

 

She finds a place. A house. Brick walls, gray roof. Third from the left on a narrow street surrounded by woods, still off the highway but far enough away from the herd that took Reagan’s family for Beth to feel comfortable stopping.

The front door’s hanging open on its hinges like a loose tooth, but when Beth searches the interior—it’s a ranch house, so she only has to check one floor and a small, cluttered basement—she finds no monsters, just the evidence of a quick escape. Drawers hanging open, shadows on the walls where picture frames used to hang. More of what Beth saw back at the yellow house on the shady street.

The front door is the only door, and Beth turns the lock before shoving the sofa up against it for good measure. Then she curls up in the La-Z-Boy in the den and hugs her knees to her chest, muscles jerking every few seconds as she comes slowly down from her adrenaline rush.

She keeps seeing it. What happened to Tyler and Megan. What happened to _Abbey_. How Beth was holding onto her until suddenly she _wasn’t_ , how she went down like a deer under those _things_ that used to be children, how they tore strips of her flesh off her bones like kids picking the skin off a turkey at Thanksgiving dinner. Reagan and Max trusted Beth to protect her, to protect _all_ of their kids because _she was the one with the gun_ , and she couldn’t. She just—couldn’t.

Max and Reagan. Did they survive? Even if they did, Beth doubts she’ll ever see them again, and part of her’s grateful for that.

She can’t face them. They _trusted her with their kids_ , and she—

And she _what_? No, never mind, here’s a better question: how could _they_ put that kind of responsibility on _her_? What was the justification for that? Because she had a gun? That’s not fair. Gun or no gun, she’s just a kid, too, younger than their oldest daughter, and they treated her like an adult. They expected too much of her. It’s _not fair_ —

_You’re right. It isn’t. But they were just doing what they thought was best in a shitty situation. They were just trying to get the four of you to safety. What happened isn’t your fault, but it isn’t theirs, either._

_Oh, so_ now _you’ve got something to say,_ Beth thinks acerbically. _This is how I know it’s not really you I’m hearing. The real you isn’t this reasonable._

Maggie offers no retort. Guess she isn’t feeling super chatty today.

But Beth’s right, is the thing. If Maggie _were_ here, if she knew that Max and Reagan had sent Beth away without any adults to protect her or their children, she’d be screaming her head off. Might even threaten to shoot them herself.

Except Maggie’s _not_ here, is she? No one’s here. Beth’s alone.

She’s alone as she’s ever been.

She sinks her fingers into her ponytail. Grips.

What’s she supposed to do? _What is she supposed to do?_ There’s food in the cabinets—she checked—but what happens when she runs out? She can’t hunt, and even if she could, she wouldn’t want to use the Browning. Wouldn’t want to make that much noise. God, if Daryl was going to kick her out on her ass, couldn’t he at least have given her his crossbow instead of Merle’s gun?

Daryl. She wonders how he’s doing. Fine, probably. Merle’s wound is mostly healed, and they should be able to move on without any trouble soon.

Beth’s never gonna see either one of them again.

It’s funny, how awful that makes her feel.

She lifts her head off her knees. Looks at the Browning she set down on the side table, next to the lamp that doesn’t work. Well. If things get real bad, she can always shoot herself.

She laughs unsteadily, then silences herself before it can turn into a sob.

She straightens her curved spine and lowers her legs, cramped and tingling after being folded up for so long. Her abdomen’s molted in bruises from colliding with that car roof, and they sing whenever she breathes too hard. 

It got dark outside while she sat here for an undetermined number of minutes. Sunset, or after. Hard to tell for sure, with the dense foliage overhead. But late.

She could always try sleeping. The door’s locked and barricaded, and she’s got a gun, even if she doesn’t really know how to use it. She’s as safe as she’s gonna get, probably. And if she sleeps, she won’t have to think about how brutally _fucked_ she is.

Won’t have to think about a lot of things.

She stands up. Stares down her front. The dresser drawers were empty, but she found a bin of old clothes in the basement, changed out of her ruined things and into a pair of jeans that bag around her hips and a long-sleeved t-shirt that hangs off her shoulders. Her boots are a lot dirtier than they were when Daryl picked them out for her, but she’s not trading them for anything.

Now that she’s on her own, she’ll need those steel toes more than ever.

She indulges in a sigh, then grabs the Browning and checks the safety. She’s got her pick of two small bedrooms, and it _is_ getting late, so she might as well—

Might as well duck out of sight of the windows, actually, because she’s dead certain that she just heard someone or some _thing_ climb onto the front porch.

She crouches on the floor, clutching the Browning to her heart as she strains to hear past the sound of her own hammering pulse. Maybe she imagined it. Yeah, could be—

The doorknob rattles.

So. Not imagining it, then.

Great.

She swears internally, then sets the Browning aside and unties her laces, stepping carefully out of her heavy boots before retrieving the gun and creeping down the short hallway in her stockinged feet. She doesn’t click the Browning’s safety off, but her finger rides it as she eases toward the front door, hunched low so whoever or whatever’s out there doesn’t spot her through the window. 

She flattens herself against the wall beside that window and holds her breath. Peeks through the blinds.

Someone’s out there. A man, and a fairly large one. Alive, she’s pretty sure. He’s taken a few steps back from the door and seems to be scanning the house—checking for signs of life?—and Beth can’t make out his face, but—

But.

His arms are full of something big and unwieldy, and she recognizes the shape.

Her heart stills, then starts up again in double time.

Holy shit. Holy _shit_ —

She steps back from the window. Pushes the sofa away from the door with a pained grunt. Unlatches the lock and steps onto the porch, body heat leaching out through her thin socks and into the cool concrete underfoot.

No power, so the porchlights don’t flicker on, but she doesn’t need them. She knows exactly who this is. Thinks she’d recognize him even without the crossbow to give her a hint.

“Daryl?”

He’s pointing the crossbow at her head—he probably aimed it at the door when he heard her rustling around inside—but he lowers it the second she speaks.

“Beth,” he says, and if she had any lingering doubts, they vanish as soon as she hears his voice. “What the fuck—”

His tirade cuts off with a huff when Beth _hurls_ herself at him, arms squeezing around his neck, the Browning knocking into his spine. She should probably apologize for that, but she can’t speak past the lump in her throat—all she can do is hold on and press her face to his shoulder, inhaling the smell of skin and sweat and _DarylDarylDaryl_.

He found her. He did. She’s not alone anymore.

It was stupid of her to come outside without any shoes on, and now she’s shivering in her socks—or maybe it’s just abject relief that’s making her shake like this. Whatever the cause, she can’t seem to stop.

Can’t seem to let him go, either.

The crossbow butts up against her flank and aggravates her bruises, and Daryl’s free hand finds purchase around her elbow. He tensed right up when she hugged him, and he still hasn’t relaxed into the contact, but he’s not shoving her off of him, either. Like the first time she did this, he’s just _allowing_ her to hold him.

That probably means a lot, coming from him.

“Alright, c’mon.” His voice is gruff but not mean, and he’s gentle about it when he uses his grip on her elbow to ease her back. “Get inside, g’on. Ain’t safe out here.”

Beth clings for another second, then lets him go and steps back, and he follows her inside. Locks the door behind him.

“All clear?” he asks, and she nods.

No sooner has he set his crossbow down on a nearby table than she’s grabbing onto him again with enough force to rock him back on his heels, and he swears under his breath even as he steadies her with a hand pressed to the small of her back. He’s wearing some kind of vest—leather, from the smell and feel—and Beth grabs two fistfuls of it as she burrows into his warmth. Warm. He’s so warm. He’s warm and his heart is beating and _he came back for her_. Again.

“How’d you find me?” she mumbles against his collarbone, tasting his sweat. She wants to press her lips to his pulse point, but she doesn’t think he’d welcome that.

His fingers snag in her pilfered shirt. He’s still tense as a sinner in church, but this is the closest he’s ever come to reciprocating her hugs.

“Tracked ya,” he says, voice rumbling like thunder in her ear. “Found your shirt by that school bus. Shit, girl, what the hell were you thinkin’?”

 _Now_ Beth lets him go, the better to scowl at him. Her eyes have adjusted well enough to the dark that she can see him scowling back.

“What was _I_ thinkin’? _You’re_ the one who told me not to let the door hit my ass on the way out.” 

Daryl sucks his lower lip into his mouth. His fingers dance at his sides.

“Didn’ say that. Jus’ said you _could_ go, if you wanted.”

“You are so full of _shit_ , Daryl Dixon,” Beth snaps, and turns away from his startled face to storm into the living room. She sets the Browning down on the side table and flops into the chair, fuming.

 _This guy_. She swears to God. This. Guy.

Daryl slouches into the room a minute later, crossbow on his back, head ducked. He hovers in the doorway, then approaches Beth’s chair. Crouches in front of it and fiddles with his fingers.

Beth’s mouth wobbles. “You can’t say that stuff to me again,” she tells him. “You _can’t_. If you do, I’ll have to leave for real. I mean it.”   

Daryl’s shoulders appear to cave in on themselves. “Yeah,” he says, picking at his cuticles. “Yeah, alright. M’ tired’a trackin’ your ass down, anyways.”

“ _This time_ wasn’t my fault,” Beth reminds him, icy as a glacier, and he has the grace not to argue the point.

He came back. He really did. He came back for her. Hasn’t even asked her what the hell she did with the rest of his guns. Like he doesn’t even _care_ about that, so long as she’s okay.

Beth clears her throat. “Why’d you—why’d you come after me?”

Daryl shrugs. “Shit, I dunno. Didn’t trust those people to keep you alive, I guess.” His mouth quirks, the shadow of a smile. “’Sides—Merle wants his gun back.”

Beth huffs. Rolls her eyes. Smiles a little too despite herself.

Daryl tilts his head. Looks at her sidelong. “Y’alright? You ain’t—”

“Ain’t bit,” Beth says quietly. “Ain’t even scratched. One almost got me, but I—I killed it. Stabbed it in the eye.”

Daryl nods, slowly. “Good,” is all he says.

He doesn’t ask what happened to the Rhodeses. If he found Beth’s flannel shirt, then he had to’ve seen what was left of Abbey, but he only met her the once, and maybe there wasn’t enough left of her for him to identify. Maybe he saw the shock of blond hair and panicked before seeing her face and realizing it wasn’t Beth.  

Either way, he doesn’t ask, and she’s grateful for it.

She’s grateful for a lot of things, actually.

Daryl sits back on his haunches. Sets his crossbow aside.

“Gettin’ late,” he says. “We’ll wait till mornin’, then head back to the house, pick up Merle an’ get the fuck outta here.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Beth says. She hesitates, then slides out of the chair, sitting close enough to Daryl that their knees jostle. He doesn’t scoot away.

“It’s still your fault I left,” she reminds him. “But thanks. Really.”

“Wouldn’t’a been right to leave you like that,” he mumbles, just like he had before, and Beth’s lips twitch.

They were awful, the things she saw today. No one should _have_ to see them, and she thinks they’ll stay with her for the rest of her life—however long or short that life may be—but right now, she’s safe, and she’s not alone.

“You’re a real decent man, Daryl Dixon.”

Daryl scoffs, but when she eases forward to rest her head against his shoulder, he lets her take her tiny liberty.

“Hey,” she says after a beat. “How old’re you, anyway? I never asked.”

There’s a pause, like he’s digesting the question. Beth gets why; it’s a pretty weird thing to ask, given the circumstances. Eventually he says, “Thirty-six.”

 _Thirty-six._ “I was off by five years.”

“Huh?”

“Nothin’.” Beth presses her lips to his shoulder, so fleetingly that he probably doesn’t even feel it. “Never mind.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for implied offscreen suicide, the semi-graphic death of a child, and brief suicide ideation.


End file.
